Memories and wellbeing in post-industrial communities.

MemoWb will address how current uses and different levels of community engagement with industrial heritage contributes to build practices of memory making that in turn impact on communities’ well-being in contexts of deindustrialisation. Through Community-Based Action Research (CBAR), qualitative analysis, and comparison of case studies in Portugal, Spain, and the UK, MemoWb will bring post-industrial communities’ perspectives to the centre of international debates about well-being, heritage and conservation that have taken place on academic and public policy levels. MemoWb will be conducted at the Institute for Social Movements (ISB) of Ruhr University Bochum (RUB, Germany) under the supervision of Professor Stefan Berger, a well-known specialist on the comparative history of deindustrialisation, industrial heritage, and memory. MemoWb will provide me research-based education on CBAR to address underdeveloped themes in industrial heritage studies, such as well-being, and will make post-industrial communities more visible and active in processes of heritage making. Moreover, it will contribute to the international project Deindustrialisation and the Politics of Our Time (DéPOT) to examine communities’ connections with industrial heritage and memory as experiences of deindustrialisation as well as responses to it.