Projects

DEINDUSTRIALIZATION AND THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME

(De)Industrial Kent are co-investigators in the international Deindustrialization and the Politics of our Time project.

The DePOT partnership examines the historical roots of deindustrialization and the contemporary responses to it. The goal is to understand deindustrialization in transnational or comparative perspective, its causes, the responses to it, its effects, and its legacies. The partnership joins 25 leading specialists in the study of deindustrialization as well as 18 research centres and 16 industrial museums, heritage groups, trade unions, labour archives, Indigenous organizations, and publishers. The focus is on the transnational connections between and comparisons among the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom – the heart of the old “industrial world.”

The partnership’s overarching objectives are four-fold: (1) Understand the long-term consequences of deindustrialization and the underlying reasons for the rise of populist movements in Western Europe and North America, in order to better understand our political conjuncture; (2) Situate the regional and local experience of deindustrialization within a wider transnational framework; (3) Consider how race, gender, the environment, and settler colonialism structure and otherwise get bound-up in the class politics of deindustrialization; and, (4) Forge connections between the leading researchers and partners in deindustrialization studies across six countries and to create a transnational community of practice where the next generation of deindustrialization researchers is nurtured and connected across borders.