Practices and Negotiations of Belonging in the Deindustrialising Coalfields: Navigating School, Education and Memory Through a Time of Transformation

This chapter examines affective memories of education among academics from Britain’s former coalfields. As we know, schooling is critically formative of identity and belonging, as well as relationships to education. These experiences are encoded in troubling affective memories, which sit alongside more positively balanced ones. Relatedly, everyday practices of collaborative remembering can help communicate and process such memories and experiences. The research documented here used collaborative remembering principles to explore and reveal the complex memories and legacies of school and education in the context of deindustrialisation. Participants/authors all attended coalfield schools and undertook primary and secondary education during the decline of the coal industry. Though atypical of both our former school and current work peers, the findings elucidate complex memories related to geographical, historical, class and gender inequalities/privileges and advances understanding of how legacies continually manifest to mediate present-day contexts. The chapter concludes by arguing that collaborative remembering practices, additional to enhancing memory retrieval, can also be a therapeutic and reconciliatory process for making sense of shared and personal pasts and lived history’s bearing on life course trajectories.