Abstract
This chapter examines affective memories of education among academics from Britain’s former coalfields. As we know, schooling is critically formative of identity and belonging, as well as relationships to education. These experiences are encoded in troubling affective memories, which sit alongside more positively balanced ones. Relatedly, everyday practices of collaborative remembering can help communicate and process such memories and experiences. The research documented here used collaborative remembering principles to explore and reveal the complex memories and legacies of school and education in the context of deindustrialisation. Participants/authors all attended coalfield schools and undertook primary and secondary education during the decline of the coal industry. Though atypical of both our former school and current work peers, the findings elucidate complex memories related to geographical, historical, class and gender inequalities/privileges and advances understanding of how legacies continually manifest to mediate present-day contexts. The chapter concludes by arguing that collaborative remembering practices, additional to enhancing memory retrieval, can also be a therapeutic and reconciliatory process for making sense of shared and personal pasts and lived history’s bearing on life course trajectories.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Antonsich, M. (2010). Searching for belonging—An analytical framework. Geography Compass, 4(6), 644–659.
Arnold, J. (2020). ‘That rather sinful city of London’: The coal miner, the city and the country in the British cultural imagination c.1969–2014. Urban History, 47(2), 292–310.
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity.
Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage.
Bennett, K., Beynon, H., & Hudson, R. (2000). Coalfields regeneration: Dealing with the consequences of industrial decline. Joseph Rowntree Trust.
Bennett, J. (2014a). Gifted places: The inalienable nature of belonging in place. Environment and Planning D Society and Space, 32(4), 658–671.
Bennett, J. (2014b). Researching the intangible: A qualitative phenomenological study of the everyday practices of belonging. Sociological Research Online, 19(1), 1–12.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Routledge.
Bright, G. N. (2011). ‘Off the Model’: Resistant spaces, school disaffection and ‘aspiration’ in a UK coal-mining community. Children’s Geographies, 9(1), 63–78.
Cresswell, T. (1996). In place-out of place: Geography, ideology, and transgression. University of Minnesota Press.
Brown, S., & Reavey, P. (2017). Contextualising autobiographical remembering: An expanded view of memory. In M. L. Meade, C. B. Harris, P. Van Bergen, J. Sutton, & A. J. Barnier (Eds.), Collaborative remembering: Theories, research, and applications (pp. 197–215). Oxford University Press.
Dennis, N., Henriques, F., & Slaughter, C. (1956). Coal is our life: An analysis of a Yorkshire mining community. Travistock.
Emery, J. (2019). Geographies of belonging in the Nottinghamshire coalfield: Affect, temporality and deindustrialisation (Doctoral Thesis). University of Leicester.
Emery, J. (2020). After coal: Affective-temporal processes of belonging and alienation in the deindustrializing Nottinghamshire coalfield, UK. Frontiers in Sociology, 5(38).
Fivush, R., Zaman, W., & Merrill, N. (2018). Developing social functions of autobiographical memory within family storytelling. In M. L. Meade, C. B. Harris, P. Van Bergen, J. Sutton, & A. J. Barnier (Eds.), Collaborative remembering: Theories, research, and applications (pp. 38–54). Oxford University Press.
Francis, L. E. (1994). Laughter, the best mediation: Humour as emotion management in interaction. Symbolic Interaction, 17(2), 147–163.
Gilbert, D. (1995). Imagined communities and mining communities. Labour History Review, 60(2), 47–110.
High, S. (2018). One job town: Work, belonging, and betrayal in Northern Ontario. University of Toronto Press.
Lähdesmäki, T., Saresma, T., Hiltunen, K., Jäntti, S., Sääskilahti, N., Vallius, A., & Ahvenjärvi, K. (2016). Fluidity and flexibility of ‘belonging’: Uses of the concept in contemporary research. Acta Sociologica, 59(3), 233–247.
Linkon, S. (2018). The half-life of deindustrialization: Working-class writing about economic restructuring. University of Michigan Press.
May, V. (2017). Belonging from afar: Nostalgia, time and memory. The Sociological Review, 65(2), 401–415.
Pohn-Lauggas, M. (2020). Individual and collective practices of memory. In P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. W. Sakshaug, & R. A. Williams (Eds.), SAGE research methods foundations. Sage.
Savage, M. (2010). The politics of elective belonging. Housing, Theory and Society, 27(2), 115–161.
Schein, R. H. (2009). Belonging through land/scape. Environment and Planning A, 41(4), 811–826.
Simpson, K. (2021). Social haunting, education, and the working class: A critical Marxist ethnography in a former mining community. Routledge.
Simpson, K., & Simmons, R. (2021). Education and social haunting in post-industrial Britain: Primary school pupils’ experiences of schooling in a former coalmining community. British Journal of Educational Studies, 69(6), 715–733.
Strangleman, T. (2017). Mining a productive seam? The coal industry, community and sociology. Contemporary British History, 32(1), 18–38.
Taylor, Y. (2016). Fitting into place?: Class and gender geographies and temporalities. Routledge.
Tomaney, J. (2015). Regions and place II: Belonging. Progress in Human Geography, 39(4), 507–516.
Trudeau, D. (2006). Politics of belonging in the construction of landscapes: Place-making, boundary drawing and exclusion. Cultural Geographies, 13(3), 421–443.
Turner, R. (2000). Coal was our life: An essay on life in a Yorkshire former pit town. Sheffield Hallam University Press.
Waddington, D., Critcher, C., & Dicks, B. (2001). Out of the Ashes?: The social impact of industrial contraction and regeneration on Britain’s mining communities. Stationary Office.
Walkerdine, V. (2015). Transmitting class across generations. Theory and Psychology, 25(2), 167–183.
Walkerdine, V., & Jimenez, L. (2012). Gender, work and community after deindustrialisation: A psychosocial approach to affect. Palgrave Macmillan.
Walkerdine, V., Lucey, H., & Melody, J. (2001). Growing up girl: Psychosocial explorations of gender and class. Palgrave Macmillan.
Ward, M. R. (2015). From labouring to learning: Working-class masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour: How working-class kids get working-class jobs. Ashgate.
Wood, N., & Waite, L. (2011). Scales of belonging. Emotion, Space and Society, 4(4), 201–202.
Woodin, T., McCulloch, G., & Cowan, S. (2013). Secondary education and the raising of the school-leaving age: Coming of age? Palgrave Macmillan.
Wright, S. (2015). More-than-human, emergent belongings: A weak theory approach. Progress in Human Geography, 39(4), 391–411.
Young, I. M. (1986). The ideal of community and the politics of difference’. Social Theory and Practice, 12(1), 1–26.
Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. SAGE.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Emery, J., Pattison, J., Simpson, K., Thomlinson, N., Jackson, L. (2022). Practices and Negotiations of Belonging in the Deindustrialising Coalfields: Navigating School, Education and Memory Through a Time of Transformation. In: Simmons, R., Simpson, K. (eds) Education, Work and Social Change in Britain’s Former Coalfield Communities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10792-4_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10792-4_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-10791-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-10792-4
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)