Gender, Work and Community After De-Industrialisation - (Identity Studies in the Social Sciences) by V Walkerdine & L Jimenez (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

How does an industrial community cope when they are told that closure is inevitable? What if this is only the last in a 200 year long line of threats, insecurities and closure? How did people weather the storms and how do they face the future now? While attempts to regenerate communities are everywhere, we do not often hear from the people themselves just how they managed to create safe collective spaces or how the fall of the whole house of cards brought with it effects which can be felt by young people who never knew the town when it was an industrial heartland. We hear the story of how men and women tried to cope and still want to retain their community in the face of its destruction. What can they and will they have to pass to the next generation and where will that leave the young people themselves, who have nothing to stay for but are unable to leave? This book examines these crucial questions facing post-industrial societies.

Review Quotes

"Gender, Work and Community After De-Industrialisation is a moving discernment of the social suffering of the inhabitants of Steeltown in the wake of enduring community trauma and an original ethnographic study. ... It should be of particular interest to those concerned with the many matters the research touches upon ... as well as those involved with the many people whose lives have been impacted by industrial decline." (Philip John Archard, Journal of Social Work Practice, 2015)

'This illuminating book leads its rapt readers to discover a deeply buried and greatly important truth for people in a small town in south Wales. For 200 years the town absorbed the insecurities of the market for iron and steel, until one day, the work of handling them left and with it the male honor based on such work and an identity based on that honor. Loss, collective grief, the unconscious passing down of grief from man to woman and from father to son this is the story of life in one small town, and in the modern world at large. A brilliant book.' - Arlie Hochschild, Full Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley, USA and author of The Managed Heart and The Outsourced Self .

About the Author

VALERIE WALKERDINE Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. She is editor of the journal Subjectivity. Her previous books include Growing up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class and Children, Gender, Videogames: Towards a Relational Approach to Multimedia. She is also a practising mixed media and installation artist.

LUIS JIMENEZ Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology, University of East London, UK. He is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, physician and sociologist. He has researched and published socio-psychoanalytic aspects on male emotional communication as well as psychosocial research on changes on gendered aspects of male identities within a context of de-industrialisation in the UK.