Pop History of Deindustrialisation: Narratives, Economies, Identities. “The West” in Global Perspective (1970s-today) — Conference Report

Conference Room at Trinity Hall.

As the visiting scholars gathered under the gothic arches of Trinity Hall, whose timeless walls appeared seemingly unchanged since their medieval foundations, perhaps the topic at hand felt rather anachronistic: the Pop History of Deindustrialisation. It was in Cambridge where a joint conference of the Cambridge DAAD Research Hub for German Studies and the Confronting Decline (CONDE) Project at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (Munich-Berlin) commenced on 14 November, 2024. Across three panels, nine presentations, a keynote lecture, and a performative talk, the conference explored various angles of rethinking deindustrialisation’s traditional narratives of decline and loss—instead uncovering moments of creation amidst destruction, cultural rebirth amidst socioeconomic decline, and the production of new spaces for artistic creativity among the ruins of postindustrial wastelands.

MARTINA STEBER (IfZ-Munich) delivered the welcome address, contextualising de-industrialisation as ‘one of the most significant transformations of recent history’. Yet, this phenomenon has only recently emerged in ‘historical consciousness’. While the story of de-industrialisation is dominated by images of occupational ruptures and economic recomposition, the audience is reminded that popular entertainment and the creative industries, too, were transformed by this paradigm shift of ‘existential impact’. Accordingly, the selected papers collectively explore the ‘nexus’ between deindustrialisation and pop history—under the premise that economies, politics, and culture are inextricably tied.

The irony of discussing post-industrial popular culture in pre-industrial halls was not lost in the introduction by BODO MROZEK (IfZ Munich-Berlin), who noted this temporal ‘absurdity’ before drawing a reconciling parallel between this ancient setting and the conference’s modern themes: after all, the rock band Pink Floyd came ‘straight outta Cambridge’ (an allusion to the hip-hop song ‘Straight Outta Compton’). Though the hosting town may appear frozen in time, ‘pop culture’ certainly is not, instead existing as a ‘locus of radical structural change’. Across the past few decades, digitalisation has fundamentally altered the nature of producing and distributing cultural products—transforming physical commodities into intangible ‘downloads’ of a ‘sharing economy’. Given this increasingly interconnected world, PAROMA GHOSE (IfZ Munich) concluded the introduction by emphasising the conference’s aim of breaking out of the field’s traditional fixation on ‘the West’ to explore a more global perspective on the international experience of de-industrialisation. The study of pop culture, Ghose explained, is a fruitful device for ‘taking the temperature’ of diverse societies, tracking the comparative but uneven developments from Britain and Germany to America and Asia.

Keynote speaker Giacomo Bottà.

Keynote speaker Giacomo Bottà.

In his keynote lecture, GIACOMO BOTTÀ (Helsinki) explored pop music’s function as a mediator for societal transitions, particularly through expressing the ‘affective atmosphere’ of deindustrialisation. After analysing musical production across multiple European industrial cities between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Botta found that music’s ‘atmospheric dimension’ preserved and re-transmitted collective values, identities, and memories across a society’s epochal shifts. Thus, in contrast to the images of opportunity loss and community disintegration commonly displayed in the photography and cinema of that era, the musical medium often ‘empowers’ deindustrialised lives by providing a basis of cultural continuity amidst socioeconomic displacement. Botta’s main argument, then, is that music acted as a ‘Vanishing Mediator’ (borrowing the late Frederic Jameson’s term): ‘deindustrialisation music’ stood as the common factor between the industrial paradigm of material production and the post-industrial paradigm of ‘symbolic consumption’. By this logic, music also possesses the ability to ‘anticipate crisis’. As for the mechanics behind the facilitation of this transition, Botta explained, music ‘curates’ material heritage as a ‘cultural catalyst’.

Initiating a series of questions from the audience, MARCUS BÖICK (King’s College, Cambridge), after revealing that he was born in a ‘proper postindustrial town’, expressed interest in how Botta’s examples included deindustrial music being produced in cities that were ‘not really postindustrial’ in typical classifications. Böick then asked whether there may exist hostile sentiments towards ‘neoliberals’ for ‘destroying’, through commodifying and commercialising, music that originally represented a once-alternative culture. Shifting the attention to the demographics of this music’s audience, JÖRG ARNOLD (Nottingham) asked ‘for whom’, exactly, is this music a vanishing mediator?

Similarly, Martina Steber raised the question of which social group is being ‘empowered’ by this music: the working class or the bourgeoisie? Botta acknowledged his lack of explicitly pinpointing a particular social identity behind this genre, while clarifying that the phenomenon tends to embrace a ‘populist’ demographic. DARREN O’BYRNE (Wolfson College, Cambridge) questioned the presentation’s argument, asking if the music, here, may have been primarily engendered in response to deindustrialisation rather than constituting a pre-existing bridge from the previous era. Botta replied by explaining that the music was not primarily a reaction to the changes, but rather ‘part of the change’ itself. O’Byrne then expressed a more fundamental scepticism, questioning whether this thesis may be over-intellectualising what may otherwise be a much simpler ‘organic’ phenomenon. Here, Botta reaffirmed his stance on music’s prescience as ‘a sort of detector tool’ for prefiguring impending societal trends.

Opening the first panel, FLORIAN VÖLKER (ZZF Potsdam), examined the parallels between the German New Wave movement of the late 1970s to early 1980s and the avant-gardes of the Weimar Republic. Both groups defied their ‘respective eras’ countercultural and alternative art scenes, which had opposed the ethos of industrial modernity. Against the grain, in either case, these artists sought to re-appropriate the connotations of machinery from a tone of repudiation to one of glorification. While dominant Weimar artistic currents rebuked the industrial age of their times, mourning the degeneration of humans into machines, writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Jünger and visual artists like George Grosz instead celebrated precisely these perceived discontents of modernity. Decades later, in the face of renewed criticisms of a now fading industrial landscape and a growing environmental movement in the mainstream media of the West German public, the post-industrial bands Kraftwerk, Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, and Die Krupps embraced the now marginalised images of heartless machinery. Here, Völker coined the term ‘cold pop’ to describe this genre, whose main themes encompass a futuristic cult of technology and the ‘man-machine’, positive affirmations of the post-industrial present, and nostalgic restagings of the blue-collar worker. Through an impressive amount of examples—from song lyrics venerating metal and steel, while expressing ‘disgust for nature’, to musical and visual techniques ‘achieving a robotic effect’ to display the ‘man-machine’—Völker revealed the recurring consistency of these motifs.

Artistic creativity amidst postindustrial decay can also be observed across the Atlantic, in 1970s-1980s New York City. PETER MCMURRAY (Queen’s College, Cambridge) challenged a classical interpretation of deindustrialisation that focuses on modernisation’s destructive nature, exemplified by Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air (1982). The industrial landscape of New York City, McMurray argued, did not melt into air in this era, but was rather remoulded into new, innovative musical practices and communities. In particular, this period saw the rise of two groundbreaking genres: the ‘jazz loft’ scene in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where ‘free jazz’ was developed, and the emergence of hip hop in the South Bronx. Crucially, the gestations of both musical traditions were made possible through the surrounding urban transformations that had created unique spaces. The exodus of manufacturing and the ‘urban renewal’ planning of a deindustrialising New York had engendered new ‘material ecosystems’ which stimulated a novel reshaping of the acoustic imagination.

At the heart of this cross-sector transformation, McMurray observed, stood the ‘expressway world’, which did not only produce noisy ‘shout[ing] on the street’—but also ‘rap on the street’. As such, one must listen to deindustrialisation, for the highways from Downtown to the Bronx were ‘part of the musical infrastructure themselves’, heard as a facilitating agent in melodic innovation. Since highways are designed to increase one’s ‘proximity to capital’, the collapsing of centre and periphery was behind the elevation of once-fringe, now-mainstream, sounds in the popular consciousness. In this way, hip hop’s success was achieved not in spite of, but rather ‘predicated’ on, ‘the context of decay that birthed it’. Thus, at least for New York’s deindustrialisation experience, perhaps one can instead say that ‘all that is solid melts into music’.

Peter McMurray, Olivia Frigo-Charles, and Florian Völker.

Diverging from the harmony of the previous presentations’ endeavours to salvage hidden beauty within the discontents of deindustrialisation, OLIVIA FRIGO-CHARLES (Zurich) brings calamity and despair back to centre stage. The case of industrial decline in Port Talbot, South Wales and its cultural representation in the recent BBC television series The Way (2024) represent a modern rendition of the more traditional picture of ruin and anxiety. For a town and community long defined by its steel industry, deindustrialisation has wrought both economic turmoil and an identity crisis. After interviewing locals of Port Talbot, Frigo-Charles found that the dominant opinion expressed nostalgia for ‘the smoke and fire’, as the closing steelworks constituted crucial symbols which, for them, evoke ‘home’. Here, industrial sites were not only workplaces but also spaces of ‘camaraderie’. As such, the loss of jobs was intertwined with the loss of cultural communities. The fictional show’s portrayals of widespread anxiety, social unrest, civil conflict, and the struggle to maintain family ties and communal identities, Frigo-Charles argued, were accurate representations of the city’s contemporary realities. In fact, the show was received very positively by the actual residents of the depicted town. Further, the speaker particularly noted the series’ ability to capture post-industrial gender dynamics, especially the attention to male vulnerability amidst the upheavals of deindustrialisation.

At the end of the panel, Bodo Mrozek pondered whether these studies could somehow be brought together. Indeed, the imagery of German machinery in Völker’s research can be connected to McMurray’s study of American hip hop, Mrozek noted, through the topic of race: there exists, within hip hop, an idea that robots transcend racial divides and embody the vision of a raceless utopia; after pointing out the presence of Black American DJs performing in Berlin, as well as how the German-speaking artist Falco is often considered to have been the first white rapper in the US, Mrozek then wondered if there may be a link between Afro-futurism and the German-robotic trope. In response, McMurray pointed to the fact that the Black American rapper Afrika Bambaataa, whose music featured futuristic themes, has borrowed melodies and effects from the German band Kraftwerk, known for its machinery themes.

Alex Robertson.

The second panel began with ALEX ROBERTSON’s (St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge) presentation on how deindustrialisation affected Sheffield’s music scene in the 1980s. After having long been considered the ‘industrial engine room’ of its country, much of its industrial output and pride were shut down by global economic factors and neoliberal policies. Space remained central in this study, as Robertson tracked the ways in which the ‘physical scars’ of a postindustrial landscape enkindled musical innovation. Abandoned factories became rehearsal settings for rising bands and artists. Yet, the industrial decay was more than a backdrop for the music; the setting, Robertson argued, seeped into the music itself—thereby producing a distinctive ‘Sheffield sound’ and acoustic identity. Here, post-punk bands employed ‘electrical equipment’, ‘whirring machinery’, and ‘heavy metal drums’. Further, song lyrics often contained a particular ‘ironic and nuanced’ sense of humour that evoked memories of the ‘working men’s clubs’, an act that Robertson described as indicating a ‘psychogeographic and cultural link’ to the city. The question of how these sounds were influenced by their location and environment was further explored in a case study of a popular venue for these bands—the Leadmill—which the speaker situated within ‘a wider spatial history’ of the relationship between ex-industrial sites and the musical identity of the Steel City.

David Robb and Matthew Worley.

Globalisation and its discontents constituted not only a background, DAVID ROBB (Belfast) argued, but the subject of conscious reflection and critique in the songs of Gerhard Gundermann. During the East German transition period from the industrial 1970s of the GDR to the post-industrial 1990s of a unified Germany, Gundermann demonstrated an acute awareness of the emerging economic and moral quandaries behind the rising globalised order which he presciently perceived. More than an artist intellectualising changes to his surrounding world from a distance, Gundermann was an industrial worker himself and ultimately lost his job to the forces of deindustrialisation. Moreover, beyond expressing the affective tribulations of displaced workers facing an uncertain future, his music was also philosophically ahead of his time—anticipating the anti-captialist discourse on globalisation that emerged, after his death, at the start of the following century. In particular, Robb noted, Gundermann was one of the first in his field of work to realise the harms of industrial pollution, raising awareness of the environmental consequences of coal use. Ultimately, his belief in humanity’s responsibility to protect nature—and his faith in nature’s non-hierarchal character and its regenerative power—framed both his implicit critiques of the GDR’s party hierarchy as well as his call for turning away from the harmful world of machines.

At last, the conference’s attention moved beyond the Western world through SUNGMIN RHO’s (IHEID Geneva) study of the impact of deindustrialisation on gender relations in South Korea. While previous studies in the West have revealed that deindustrialisation can lead to ‘gendered discontent’—particularly through the status anxiety faced by men amidst job loss—this phenomenon can also be observed in the most automated country in the world: South Korea. In contrast to the more familiar Western story of middle-aged, blue-collar men turning towards right-wing populism, the South Korean case exhibits an ‘extreme’ gender polarisation dividing the younger, educated generations. While young women have become increasingly feminist in outlook and keen on financial independence after attaining university degrees, their male counterparts have increasingly adopted reactionary views, clinging to a fading socioeconomic patriarchy.

Alex Robertson, Dave Robb, and Sungmin Rho. Chair: Markus Böick.

Through surveys and interviews with Korean university students, Rho found that the rise of college attendance led to higher expectations and narrower preferences in employment outcomes. At the same time, a powerful social stigma surrounding the image of blue-collar manufacturing work has further contributed to ever more intense competition for ever fewer ‘socially reputable’ jobs. In this environment, young men’s stubborn attachment to, and failure to manifest, the principle of male-as-breadwinner has prompted many of them to put off, and even give up on, marriage and dating. Coupled with the rising ‘4B’ anti-birth and anti-sex movement among young females, this socio-cultural clash within a deindustrialised economy has resulted in an impending population crisis.

A brief set of questions then followed. Paroma Ghose asked whether there existed a relationship between South Korea’s experience of deindustrialisation and developments in its cultural and creative sector. Sungmin Rho confirmed that the gender polarisation is indeed reflected in popular culture and media. Specifically, while television shows are primarily scripted by women and often reflect feminist themes, movie directing is dominated by men and typically features heroic narratives of ‘macho men’. Oliva Frigo-Charles then questioned the potential similarities and differences between South Korea’s anti-feminist wave and the ‘incel’ culture of the Western world. Rho replied that while the Western ‘incel’ movement predominantly survives online and retains a socially marginal status, Korea’s anti-feminist culture occupies a mainstream status in politics and society.

Darren O’Byrne and Johannis Salim Ismaiel Wendt setting up the mixer.

All eyes (and ears) then shifted to the turntables of a DJ set, as JOHANNES SALIM ISMAIEL-WENDT (Hildesheim) delivered a performative talk and sound lecture on the ‘de-re-de-industrialisation’ of the interlinked industrial production of sugar and popular music in Germany. Setting the scene by combining narration with tunes, the speaker illustrated a Caribbean music festival taking place amidst sugar-beet fields in Lower Saxony. Overall, the DJ sought to ‘sound out’ the musical history of Europe’s long and ongoing ‘emancipation process’, in which beet sugar production’s colonial cane plantations and enslaving practices were implicated. Given the contemporary continuity of white-owned firms directing black artists in the musical industry, echoes of the oppressive past continue to be heard in the pop sounds of today. From reggae to classical to hip hop, Ismaiel-Wendt played over two dozen tracks, collapsing multiple genres and centuries.

Aisthetic research instruments at the “PopHisory of Deindustrialization” conference.

As part of the immersive experience of this performance, every audience member received a Whistle Pop, a candy shaped with flute-like functions, to participate in the harmonies. Though most participants blew discordant and arbitrary notes before consuming the sugary device, Peter McMurray exhibited his musical talents by accurately whistling out the melody of 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop”, while that track was playing. Throughout the session, the topic of race was brought to the forefront as contemporary pop music was juxtaposed with samples from the grand opera L’Africaine, a reading of Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitic pamphlet “Judaism in Music”, and the sounds of blackface minstrel shows in Germany. Altogether, Ismaiel-Wendt sought to demonstrate that popular music is heard against ‘the backdrop of colonial logics’, while either re-visualising old ‘colonial fantasies’ or creating new ‘spaces of resistance’. In the end, given the inseparability of music and the listener’s unconscious political mappings of cultural representations, Ismaiel-Wendt questioned whether sounds could ever be perceived independently of their embeddedness in broader discursive networks—a debate on the possibility or impossibility of ‘decolonised listening’.

The final panel began with a turn to cinema. ELENA GORFINKEL (King’s College, London) presented the ‘deindustrialised mode’ of filmmaking behind Barbara Loden’s movie Wanda (1970), in which Loden featured as actress, writer, and director. Location and space again proved central to the analysis. Shot amidst the industrial ruins of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where anthracite strip mining had ‘scarred’ the landscape, Wanda was deliberately set in a region that, in Loden’s words, ‘had the look of an area that had lost its main industry’. In addition to background visuals composed of ‘man-made mountains of waste’, Loden’s decision to forego fancy cosmetics and showcase cheap clothing underpinned her deliberately ‘deglamorised performance’—a statement against the conventional beauty standards of the Hollywood establishment.

Indeed, the film intended to be ‘harsh on the eye’, prompting critical reactions indicative of America’s broader neglect of the ‘plight of the dispossessed’. The general lack of attention to this optically discomforting subject thus rendered the film almost ‘foreign’ to the cosmopolitan viewer. Above all, beyond the literally deindustrialised images seen within the film, the fact that Loden’s filmmaking was conducted independently from the ‘film industrial systems’ thereby rendered the production process itself, Gorfinkel argued, to have embodied a ‘deindustrialised mode’. Further, Loden’s piece provided a feminist and class critique of the ‘ineluctable fates of ordinary working-class women’, deprived of both the economic and ‘psychic’ resources needed for the liberating ‘self-making’ of individuals. Ultimately, the film exposed American capitalism’s essential by-products of ‘gendered immiseration’ and the ‘disposal of the most vulnerable’—outcomes embodied in Loden’s scenes of ‘waste’ and ‘wasted people’.

Shifting the focus back to Britain, JÖRG ARNOLD (Nottingham) studied the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984/85, particularly highlighting the role of popular culture in acting as the dominant medium through which the event became ‘immortalised’ in the collective consciousness and memory of Britons. Across four postindustrial decades, cinema, artwork, and especially alternative music have done more than historical scholarship, Arnold argued, to sculpt and disseminate popular recollections of the strike—as well as to shape popular understandings of the broader meanings of deindustrialisation. The crisis of the 1970s under Margaret Thatcher’s administration particularly set the scene as music became politicised. The genre of Punk, especially, fostered a ‘declinist’ view of the postwar, and postindustrial, trajectory of the country. Although Thatcher was consistently cast as the ‘chief villain’ in the lyrics, Arnold hypothesised that the ‘countercultural edge’ of the music did not ultimately gain a broad appeal within the mining communities themselves.

Finally, the conference ended on another German topic: Holocaust representations in metal music. Here, ELENA BÖS (LMU Munich) presented a ‘discourse analysis’ of a teaser for the music video Deutschland (2019) by Rammstein and discussions in online fan forums responding to the band’s critiques. Adding to an ever-growing list of controversies and scandals, Rammstein provoked debates in the ‘national memory discourse’ on Nazism after dressing up as concentration camp inmates in the teaser. More recently, the band faced scathing allegations of sexual misconduct. Within the responses found on the fan forum LIFAD, Bös identified ‘discursive codes’ indicative of a mentality of self-victimisation against the perceived threats from ‘mainstream’ culture.

Such reactions, Bös argued, revealed deeper characteristics of heavy metal’s cultural mythos and identity: the ‘myth’ of working-class roots and unity, as well as a heritage of rebellion against the ‘perceived decline’ of their surrounding society. At the root of this stood an ‘in-group versus out-group mentality’ that saw Rammstein’s fans identify with an ‘underdog’ self-image of resisting the criticism of the mainstream ‘outsiders’. More broadly, this response reflected how deindustrialisation’s cultural discourse was founded on what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’. After all, the fanbase constituted not only an ‘imagined community’ but also a ‘felt community’ whose feelings of solidarity against outsiders produced the impression of legitimacy to substantiate such counter-oppositions.

Conference “PopHistory of Deindustrialization”, University of Cambridge, November 2024.

A final set of questions and comments then followed. Marcus Böick invoked the notion of ‘cultural victory’ amidst socioeconomic defeat through ‘winning the memory game’. Jörg Arnold applied this line of thought to the story of the striking miners, noting how a ‘cultural victory’ was indeed achieved in the ‘memory culture’, especially given how the protestors were originally widely depicted in a highly negative light at the time—yet the succeeding generations have subsequently upheld the now-dominant opposite view. Giacomo Bottà then observed how the case of Rammstein illustrates his argument of how music anticipates societal changes: specifically, how the band foreshadowed the rise of right wing populism. Florian Völker joined in on the Rammstein discussion, suggesting that it seemed ‘inevitable’ that the provocative group, which had already employed fascist symbolism prior to this incident, would eventually exploit Holocaust imagery—an act that would ‘complete their ethos’.

Elena Bös disagreed, arguing that such a trajectory was not inevitable, since the band had previously demonstrated an ability to create ‘de-historicised’ spaces stripped of such symbols. Bodo Mrozek then critiqued the notion of pop music’s ‘underdog’ identity, as the current now draws most of its followers from a larger middle class—a far cry from the narrower and humbler demographics of its origins. As such, Mrozek held, Rammstein’s recent affair was rather ‘an industrially produced scandal by a machine that has millions of dollars behind it’. Yet, Bös pointed out, even if the fans were not so marginalised in socioeconomic reality, their palpable mentality of ‘us versus the mainstream’ was nonetheless significant and influential insofar as these visions were believed to be real.

Concluding the conference, MATTHEW WORLEY (Reading) delivered the closing remarks. Reflecting on the various cultural responses to the uncertainties of deindustrialisation, Worley recalled that perhaps Raymond Williams was right in observing that culture helps us to formulate a world which we do not yet understand. Across the presented papers, Worley observed, the importance of the topographic background stood out: ‘the star of the show is the landscape’. In particular, a recurring theme played out: new spaces open up as old ones fall into disrepair. Another persistent motif of the studies, he noted, was the ‘strategy of coping’. Here, it appears that creative culture often provided potent answers for societies. Yet, practices such as the ‘heritagisation of the industrial past’ are not always successfully restorative or redemptive: does the building of coffee shops, pubs, and tourist attractions with mining imagery really compensate for the losses suffered by the former industrial workers?

Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge.

Additionally, Worley drew attention to the need for more considerations of the place of women in this story: though classically associated with images of the male proletarian, deindustrialisation, we must remember, also put women out of work. Moreover, he articulated the necessary caution one must take when attributing myriad phenomena as consequences of a vaguely-defined ‘deindustrialisation’—a trope that has now become so broadly invoked that it risks terminological inefficacy, if cited without rigorous denotations. Ending on a more hopeful note, Worley reflected on the resilient motto that, sometimes, one must ‘destroy in order to create’, finishing with a quote from the Spanish revolutionary fighter and activist Buenaventura Durruti: ‘We are not afraid of the ruins’.

short version of this conference report was published on H-Soz-Kult. All photographs private; © 2025 all rights reserved.

Conference Overview:

Convenors: Chris Young, Darren O’Byrne, Paroma Ghose and Bodo Mrozek.

Location: Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 14.11.2024 -16.11.2024

Welcome: Martina Steber (Leibniz-Institute for Contemporary History, IfZ, Munich)

Introduction: Bodo Mrozek & Paroma Ghose (IfZ Munich/Berlin)

Keynote Lecture: Giacomo Bottà (University of Helsinki): From vanishing Mediator to Cultural Heritage: Music and Deindustrialization in Europe from a Global Perspective

Panel 1: Protesting/Affirming Industrial Decline

Chair: Richard Bramwell (University of Loughborough)

  1. Florian Völker (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam): Industrial Euphoria in the Face of De-industrialisation: The German New Wave and their Roots in 1920s Avantgarde
  2. Peter McMurray (University of Cambridge): All that is solid melts into music: Free jazz and hip hop in deindustrialized New York
  3. Olivia Frigo-Charles (Zürich University, UZH): From Steel to Screen: Industrial decline in South Wales and Michael Sheen’s TV-Series The Way

Panel 2: Cultures and Economies of Deindustrialisation

Chair: Marcus Böick (King’s College, University of Cambridge)

  1. Alex Robertson (St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge): ‘Iron and Irony:’ Sheffield and the City’s Music Scene in the 1980s
  2. David Robb (Queen’s University, Belfast): Gerhard Gundermann’s Songwriting in the Context of East Germany’s Decline and Forces of Globalisation in the 1990s
  3. Sungmin Rho (Geneva Graduate Institute). Labour Market Changes and Gender Polarization in Deindustrializing Societies (Focus on South Korea)

Performative talk: Johannes Salim Ismaiel-Wendt (Hildesheim University): Riddims of the Drilling Machine. The Caribbean in Lower Saxony

Panel 3: Towards Postindustrial Identities?

Chair: Darren O’Byrne (Wolfson College, University of Cambridge)

  1. Elena Gorfinkel (King’s College, London): Mining Wanda: Barbara Loden’s Independence as Deindustrialized Mode (US, 1970)
  2. Jörg Arnold (University of Nottingham): Into the Valley of Death rode the brave Hundreds. Popular Culture and the Miners’ Strike, 1984 to the Present
  3. Elena Bös (Intitute for Contemporary History, Munich): Against the grain – Discourse of community and rebellion within Rammstein’s fan base

Closing Remarks: Matthew Worley (University of Reading)

Patrick Duan

Patrick Duan is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. He specialises in the history of modern Russia, focusing especially on the intellectual and cultural histories of the late imperial period.

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Patrick Duan (April 18, 2025). Pop History of Deindustrialisation: Narratives, Economies, Identities. “The West” in Global Perspective (1970s-today) — Conference Report. PopHistory. Retrieved May 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13ruh


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About Patrick Duan

Patrick Duan is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. He specialises in the history of modern Russia, focusing especially on the intellectual and cultural histories of the late imperial period.

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