Leaving being ‘left behind’: itineraries of operation and resistance in a post-industrial English city - Ajmal Hussain
| Dates: | 16 January 2025 |
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| Times: | 13:00 - 14:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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In this CoDE lunchtime seminar, Ajmal Hussain from the University of Warwick shares his research.
‘Left behind’ denotes a particular constituency of otherness, wherein disenchantment with the status quo is a consequence of the economic and material decline that accompanied the disappearance of large-scale industry in the UK. It is a particular condition of inhabitation that is threaded through the ruins of celebrated industries, which now appear as a blot on the streetscapes of post-industrial cities across the UK. One such place is Stoke-on-Trent - popularly known as the ‘Brexit Capital of England’ - even as it struggles to cohere as a city, but more so as a set of siloed towns that supplied labour to the ‘pits and pots’ as key vocations of a bygone era. In this presentation, I draw on recent ethnography conducted in Stoke to trace the importance of class and race consciousness derived from generations of working in the pits and pots, cultural distinction generated through pub-going, music and folklore, and national imaginaries of splendour and loss that exist alongside the rise of austerity and financing for sufficiency, which characterises life for the left behind.
Recognising that in popular parlance the category ‘left behind’ is reserved for a particular constituency - white dispossessed - whose subsequent inclination toward populist politics renders them vulnerable to political designs of welfare retrenchment and austerity, I will also incorporate minority ethnic communities who inhabit similar conditions of left behindness. Yet rather than counterpose such divergences in representation and experience, I will draw on interviews conducted with people from across diverse groups with different attachments to the city - including residents, (social) entrepreneurs, artisans and professionals involved in emerging economies of care for vulnerable groups such as children and migrants, and practitioners in the cultural industries who engage heritage in different ways – to offer an ethnographic account of itineraries pursued by diverse groups of dispossessed citizens. In doing so, I wish to consider how one might think about otherness as a singularity, as well as a shared disposition across different constituencies of citizenship. And how a territory designated as ‘left behind’ becomes a site of operation where people actively pursue aspirations and ambitions toward leaving being ‘left behind’.
In person or online.
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Room 3.9
Roscoe Building
Manchester
