Abstract
At the front line of de-industrialisation or contending with its legacy, working-class communities that were built around and became reliant upon heavy industries occupy an interesting place in the popular and academic imagination, locally and internationally. A common emphasis is to consider such places and their people as insular and parochial, and somehow different. Despite nominally being associated with older, more problematic sociological literature, this kind of understanding can and does still emerge in research where such communities are mentioned or given only an implicit status, but also in observations of the fate and actions of working-class people that launch from or end up at more deficit-focused assessments (for examples, see Gillies [2006] on working-class motherhood and Roberts and Elliott [2020] on working-class masculinity). In contrast, and speaking to the legacy of the second wave of community studies in the post-Second World War era, a more focused literature attends to the interweaving of social class, work, place, people and culture to more sympathetically depict a richer and nuanced account of the fuller composition of working-class life. While far from an uncontested subfield itself (see Strangleman, 2018), the sociological study of coal-mining communities is a mainstay of such approaches, and one to which Robin Simmons and Kat Simpson's edited collection makes an important contribution.
The editors’ introductory chapter provides a short but necessary scene setting, giving the reader a quick appetiser on the character and meaning of a mining community. It also hints at the scale, rise and politically driven decimation of Britain's mining industry, and briefly touches upon the well-known – but usefully restated – issue of how education systems perpetuate class inequalities. They return to such issues in a little more detail in their concluding chapter, which bookends ten substantive chapters from authors at different career stages, who deploy different methods and arrive at the subject matter from various disciplinary and/or theoretical perspectives. As do the editors, many authors reveal histories in and connections to Britain's coalfields and the interweaving (to greater and lesser extents) of these biographical details is an important part of the analysis.
A core contribution for many chapters is to explore ‘how the social and economic, cultural and political complexities of deindustrialisation shape working-class ways of being, identities and landscapes long after the closure of their industries’ (pp. 3–4). This departure point echoes other work in the subfield, but remains significant not only because de-industrialisation is a lived and ongoing process internationally, but because, as above, there remains in my estimation a (perhaps inadvertent) tendency to pathologise or be blinkered to the central concerns of working-class life.
The content of the ten chapters cannot be done justice in this short review, so I reserve my primary comments for a few contributions that I found to be highlights of an insightful volume. The editors concede that there is more to be said about gender and (working) life in the coalfields, but the inclusion of several chapters that address gender directly is welcome. Here, Natalie Thomlinson's use of women's oral testimonies about their experience of schooling in the post-war decades feels refreshing. While we now have an extensive literature on girls and schooling in the last three decades, Thomlinson's chapter represents an important retrospective informed by women's voices not typically heard, and one which complicates generalised stories of working-class educational disengagement. Richard Gater's chapter is also particularly useful in documenting the tensions that exist in negotiating normative masculine identities for young men in de-industrialised, isolated geographical contexts. Particularly fascinating is the coexistence of change and continuity, exemplified by young men's rejection of mining as too ‘dirty’, alongside a continuing desire for manual employment; and their assertion of some traditionally masculine characteristics mixed with recognition of their own health vulnerabilities. Finally, Diane Reay's autobiographical chapter about growing up as daughter and granddaughter of miners is as impressive as it is transparent. It does justice to the complexity of life in mining communities, not shying away from observations of gender violence, nor the self-felt shame and stigma that complicates ideas about working-class pride, but also evokes an overriding sense of connection that has shaped the solidarity central to Reay's laudable, field-defining work over many decades.
As a general reflection, the critical discussions of core issues across all chapters – such as the dispossession of working-class mining communities resulting from the neoliberal order, working-class experiences of education for good and for bad, and the material limits of the politically celebrated discourses of aspiration, mobility and meritocracy – are undertaken carefully and without recourse to nostalgia. Indeed, the efforts to avoid romanticism are such that I felt concessions about how homophobia, sexism and racism were (and are) features of coalfield communities could have been caveated by nods towards the fact that these systemic forms of oppression are far from unique to the working class, and, as we learn from postcolonial literature, are often an outcome of the logics of the ruling class, and are defining features of the organisation of racial capitalism. On that note, the volume has little to say in terms of rendering Whiteness a non-neutral category in itself. This is also a fair criticism of my own work and the broader subfields that I count as my intellectual home (see Idriss [2022] on youth sociology; Bridges [2019] on masculinities studies). As such, I make this comment only to amplify the need to collectively do more in this regard, and see this statement in keeping with the spirit of this enormously generative book that has much to (re)teach sociologists about the meaning and possibility of contemporary solidarities.
