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