About
This study examines the South Wales region as a case study in post-industrial urban transformation, analysed through three interlocking theoretical frameworks. First) Raymond Williams's "structure of feeling," maps the temporal complexity of a community whose present is saturated with the living residues of its industrial past. Second) E. P. Thompson's accounts of class formation, agency, and experience illuminate the creative dimensions of community self-making under conditions of structural adversity. Third) Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of the ability "to go on" — the capacity to continue meaningfully in the world when established foundations have been eroded or destroyed — provides the criterion through which genuine cultural vitality is distinguished from mere preservation or nostalgic commemoration. Together, these frameworks generate an analytical vocabulary to capture the irreducible complexity of post-industrial cultural life. Drawing on sustained ethnographic fieldwork, this study focuses more broadly on Port Talbot in the wake of the closure of the steelworks, exploring a range of interconnected sites and practices through which the community is negotiating its present and imagining its future. These include developments such as the revitalization of the civic center, the refurbishment of the Princess Theater, and the renovation of green space along the River Afan, alongside other less formal or more emergent forms of social and cultural activity. Taken together, these different spheres are approached as responses—varied in form and ambition—to the profound economic, institutional, and existential losses produced by deindustrialisation. The lecture will consider how such practices can be understood as gestures of refusal, revitalisation, and resilience: ways in which a community asserts that what has been lost or rendered residual still matters, that what remains is worth sustaining, and that new forms of social and cultural life might yet be made out of the ruins of the industrial past.
About the speaker...
Black Hawk Hancock is a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor. His work focuses on Culture, Theory, and Qualitative Methodology. He is the author of the ethnography American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination (University of Chicago Press). He has also written new introductions to the 2nd editions of John Fiske's books Power Plays, Power Works (Routledge), and Media Matters (Routledge). His articles engage theorists as diverse as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Erving Goffman, Jean Baudrillard, Jaques Derrida, and Georg Simmel, amongst others. His most recent book, co-authored with Roberta Garner, is Change and Disruption: Sociology of the Future (Routledge).
*Please note: Event delivered in English