Cathy Stanton is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Tufts University in Boston, where she teaches courses on ethnographic methods, food systems, myth and ritual, and cities. She has written widely about industrial heritage sites, including in her 2006 book The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City, which won the 2007 Book Award from the National Council on Public History. Her most recent book, co-authored with Michelle Moon, is Public History and the Food Movement: Adding the Missing Ingredient (Routledge, 2018). She is active in community food systems work, including in her home in western Massachusetts.
Sessions in which Cathy Stanton participates
Friday 2 September, 2022
In the refusal of people in communities abandoned by industrial capital to abandon their own places, we can read an implicit critique of the mobility and unaccountability of capital, raised by those who were once inside (however tenuously or uncomfortably) and now find themselves marginalized, “left behind.” The desire to catch up again, whether through attracting new investment or transvaluing abandoned sites as tourist attractions, makes this an essentially conservative critique that is ...
Sessions in which Cathy Stanton attends
Wednesday 31 August, 2022
In this lecture, I would like to talk about deindustrialised communities, heritage and memory in the context of right-wing populism. Drawing on studies of memory and heritage, I argue that right-wing populists have cornered the market on talking about the past of deindustrialised communities. They have successfully misrepresented this rich and complex history to fuel rage, resentment, fear and reactionary nostalgia. Indeed, ‘the past’, and in particular the industr...
Thursday 1 September, 2022
The proposed session will examine the unfolding relationship between industrial heritage and those left behind in adjoining deindustrialized working-class areas. The four papers seek to understand the socio-economic and political impact of recognizing the industrial past in the present. Two guiding questions will be asked. Can industrial heritage support those ‘left behind’ in deindustrialized areas where nothing, or very little, has filled the economic or cultural vacuum? Has industrial h...
This lecture will argue that the landscapes of industrial heritage that can be found in different parts of the world are directly related to the place-specific trajectories of deindustrialization. In other words: the different ways in which deindustrialization impacts on local communities has a direct bearing on the emergence of forms of industrial heritage. I will differentialte between deindustrialization paths and related industrial heritage regimes in a) Anglo-...
