| Project Detail |
Revitalising communities through industrial heritage
As communities worldwide grapple with deindustrialisation, the need to preserve industrial heritage and enhance community well-being becomes increasingly crucial. With the support of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, the MemoWb project aims to shed light on connections between industrial heritage, memory, and the profound impacts of deindustrialisation on communities. Through community-based action research (CBAR), qualitative analysis, and cross-country case studies, MemoWb is placing post-industrial communities at the forefront of international discussions on heritage, well-being, and conservation. Overall, the project seeks to address the underdeveloped aspects of industrial heritage studies, empowering communities to actively shape their heritage and fostering their visibility.
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. |
