Description
This paper uses social haunting to trace how intergenerational legacies of coal continue to shape young lads’ experiences of life growing up in Barnsley’s former coalfields. In partnership with the Youth Work Unit: Yorkshire and The Humber, it draws on co-created research with young lads, and narrative interviews with former miners, to examine how the temporality of the industrial past endures as ghostly presences and material traces that shape present–future experiences of community, education, and employment. This paper centres on community as a site of social haunting.At the height of coal, unions, working men’s clubs, institutes and colliery welfares stitched social life to the pit, organising and sustaining community life for miners and their families. These were not simply venues or structures but spaces, rhythms, and practices through which belonging, knowledge, and sociability were made. They organised and sustained the day-to-day fabric of community life: embedding care, culture, and solidarity in place and carrying them across generations.
The deindustrialised landscape is markedly different: shuttered or residual clubs, bare parks, and expensive public transport narrow the places where young people can gather and belong. Many lads describe a scarcity of youth and community spaces and the precarity of what remains. The paper argues for relational, co-created approaches that take the industrial past seriously by developing heritage attuned practice and policy that recognise the historical and communal textures of the past–present as experienced by young people in the former coalfields. Reframing “after coal” not as absence or loss but as a temporality in which active legacies, constraints, and resources across the past–present–future can be harnessed with and for young people to make, maintain, and contest possibilities in and beyond their communities.
| Period | 18 Jun 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Blood is the Price of Coal: Coal Communities, Health and Welfare in Britain from the 19th Century to the Present |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Coventry, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |