Living the cruel futures of industrial change

Abstract

Industrial change is related to and experienced by those affected by such changes through particular sets of relations with futures. However, engagements with industrial change have in large part included futures only in the role of the temporal, and often teleological, background of industrial change rather than addressing futures in their own right. Through an engagement with the closure and later reopening of a steelworks within Teesside, UK, this paper argues that attending to futures allows the complex relationships through which industrial change comes to be rendered present, related to and lived to be brought into accounts of the experience of industrial change. Through diverse modalities such as phone calls, tones of voice, news reports, rumour and soundscapes a future of works closure was rendered present by and for the steelworkers of Teesside. In addition to this, the paper also goes on to exemplify how such relationships with futures of industrial change can be theorized through the example of engaging with pension entitlements through the concept of ‘cruel optimism’ after the work of Lauren Berlant.

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