This post-doctoral project, currently in the planning phase, is focused on the lived and everyday experiences and relationships to coal within the context of coal phase-out in the Mitteldeutschland region. As the German state seeks to end coal extraction by a often-amended but imminent date in the next decade or two, this project is interested in understanding first and foremost the social and cultural consequences of such changes. It asks who is alienated by such changes when we consider transition and wider societal shifts in its most everyday lived terms. Additionally, it seeks to expand existing discussions around the topic to situate coal-phase out, “just transitions”, and current policy interventions and funding schemes within a broader history of deindustrialization and structural change.
In the context of alienated communities and polarised political identities, this project asks whose everyday understandings of change, transition, and transformation are valued and whose are excluded from future-making efforts. In particular, it considers how heritage and histories are understood, represented, and mobilised by future-making efforts and asks how deliberate heritage interventions can be interwoven with everyday informal forms of remembering and enduring.
Ultimately it understands future-making as an act of everyday practice, rooted in affective attachments and collective identities, drawing on understandings of prefigurative and anticipatory politics and arguing that transitions are done and lived within communities. This project will be based on ethnographic research in the region, engaging with everyday landscapes to trace legacies, futures, and heritages of the coal and wider industrial identity of the region.