Telephone: +49 (0)345 55 24 172
E-Mail: amy.walker@zirs.uni-halle.de
Main fields of interest
- Deindustrialisation and post-industrial communities
- Heritage and social memory (including work on landscapes, materiality, practices and collective memory)
- Feminist and postcolonial geographies
- Geographies of identity and community
- Ethnography
Current Research Projects
Curriculum Vitae
Amy Walker has an MSc in Social Science Research Methods from Cardiff University, and a PhD in Human Geography from Cardiff University.
Her MSc research in 2016 focused on the narratives surrounding the Aberfan disaster and the affected community, considering the role of gatekeepers and narratives of trauma in a community impacted by a coal-mining disaster in 1966. It was titled :“They don’t like to talk about it”: (Re)constructing Silence and Memory in Aberfan, Wales.”
Since then, her PhD work investigated the legacies of industrial life in another area of the South Wales coalfield, in the thesis titled: “Legacies in a South Wales Mining Town: Memory, Practice, and Community in Everyday Post-Industrial Life.”
Using ethnographic methods, she engages with the enduring legacies of industrial heritage beyond only official and formalised narratives, considering memory as rooted in the material and immaterial; affective, emotive and discursive; shared and imagined.
Her current work focuses on investigating post-industrial legacies in the context of the Central German Mining region, considering the nature of transitioning from industrial life to new forms of community, whilst continuing to conceptualise the complexity of social memory.
Publications
- Walker, A., O’Mahony, K. and Boyer, K. 2023. Recollecting the everyday: Emotion, memory and spaces of mundane practice, Emotion, Space and Society, 48, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2023.100961
- Walker, A. 2023. On geographies of endurance and inevitability in the context of UK austerity: A response to Sarah Marie Hall’s “A Pregnant Pause?”. Geoforum 142, 103756. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103756
- Owen, J., Walker, A. and Ince, A., 2022. Uncomfortable geographies. Emotion, Space and Society, 42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2022.100871
- Walker, A. 2022. Das Erbe ungerechter Übergänge: Lehren aus dem südwalisischen Kohlerevier, Berliner Gazette [online]. Available at: https://berlinergazette.de/das-erbe-ungerechter-uebergaenge-lehren-aus-dem-suedwalisischen-kohlerevier/
- Walker, A., 2021. “Everyone always did the same”: Constructing legacies of collective industrial pasts in ex-mining communities in the South Wales Valleys. Emotion, Space and Society, 41, p.100834. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100834
- Rhodes, M.A, Price, W.R. and Walker, A. eds. 2020. Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003007494
- Walker, A. 2020. ‘Everyday resonances of industrial pasts: Considering lived and affective memories in ex-coal mining landscapes in a South Wales valley.’ In: Rhodes, M.A, Price, W.R. and Walker, A. eds. Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage. London: Routledge, pp. 52-67 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003007494
- Rhodes, M.A, Price, W.R. and Walker, A. 2020. ‘Introduction: Geographies of post-industrial memory, place, and heritage’ In: Rhodes, M.A, Price, W.R. and Walker, A. eds. Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage. London: Routledge, pp.1-20 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003007494
Teaching
All modules provided at MLU in the Department of Geography and Geosciences unless specified.
Current Teaching
- Approaches and Research in Human Geography Today
- Practical Qualitative Methods
- Excursion: Singapore
- Master’s Dissertation Supervision
Past Teaching
- 21st International Summer School of the Graduate School Global Area Studies (ZIRS and Leipzig University)
- Human Geography Methods
- Integrative Geography: Global and Regional Geographies
- Excursion: Euregio Maas-Rhein Area
- Post-Industrial Place, Heritage and Living in the Left Behind (Department of Architecture, Northumbria University)
- Structural Change in South Wales
- Structural Change in the Mitteldeutsch Region
- Walking and Talking Ruins
- Global Regional Geographies
- Resource Shifts: Landschaften des Wandels im Spätindustrialismus
- Master’s Dissertation Reviewer
- Making Knowledge: Evidence and Practice (School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University)
- Field Study Visit: Researching Contemporary Issues in Tanzania (School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University)
- Developing Research Methods I (School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University)