Conference: Pop History of Deindustrialization: Narratives, Economies, Identities. “The West” in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 14-16 November 24)

Dimoni Industrial/Industrial Devil. (Idranx from Badalona, SPAIN, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons).

Since the 1970s, deindustrialization – or the massive reduction in industrial production, facilities, and jobs – has fundamentally changed Western societies. This history has tended to be narrated in terms of decline and loss, usually within a local or national locus. Recently, scholars have challenged the isolated directionality of these narratives by bringing global and cross-industrial perspectives to the fore. Deindustrialization instigated an uneven set of experiences in different spaces, and forms of rupture and continuity. Those experiences have been reflected in various forms of pop culture. As examples from Germany and Great Britain demonstrate, Western deindustrialization unfolded in the midst of global, and particularly Asian, industrialization, reinforcing each other, as the example of South Korea illustrates.

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Research project: Estonian punk (1985-1995)

Punks in Tallinn, ca. 1982. Photo: Arno Saar, collection of Tõnu Trubetsky.

The first punk bands in the ESSR were established at the end of the 1970s. Punk was blacklisted in the ESSR, after youth riots erupted at a September 1980 concert of the punk band Propeller. During the first half of the 1980s the punk movement was small but steady in size. The punk’s main ways of expression were extravagant behaviour and clothes, organizing illegal concerts and social life in Tallinn’s cafés. Nevertheless, being a punk was socially frowned upon and meant problems with family, in school and in public where the youths were ofter arrested by the militsiya. Continue reading