Description
Drawing on research at Lillydown Primary, this paper traces how the industrial heritage of the former coalfields continues to shape the present through the ghostly matters embedded in school life. I explore how the goodness of the industrial past haunts the present and ghostly matters shape relationships, social relations of schooling, and the everyday practices and ways of being and doing that structure pupils’ and teachers’ lives. These hauntings, felt rather than always spoken, reveal how place, class and inherited ghosts quietly contour educational experience in encouraging and affirmative ways.The paper then turns to my current research in Barnsley, conducted in collaboration with the Yorkshire and Humber Youth Work Unit, which engages over 100 working-class lads aged 11–25. Here, a social haunting marks the loss, injustice, and violence of deindustrialisation. The lads' experiences in education are marked by forms of alienation and exclusion. Ghosts of deindustrialisation are further complicated by the complexities of (un/diagnosed) neurodivergence, which shapes how the lads move through school, how they are perceived, and how they come to understand their own identities in relation to dominant educational norms.
Yet within these narratives lie moments of resistance, care, and possibility. Across both studies, young people carve out small but significant spaces of relationality and hope: imagining and creating alternative futures in spite of the conditions that constrain them. The paper argues that attending to the fullness of social hauntings and emergent futures offers a more expansive understanding of youth experience in former coalfields and invites us to rethink how schooling and youth and community spaces might better respond to histories that remain very much alive in the present.
| Period | 12 Feb 2026 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom |
| Degree of Recognition | National |