Das VOICES-Konsortium hielt auf der ECREA-2026-Konferenz vom 8. bis 11. September 2026 in Brno einen Vortrag zum Thema „Nostalgia and populist challenges in post-industrial communities: Futurephobia and the reimagination of the past“.
Der Konferenz-Abstract auf Englisch:
Post-industrial communities experience some of the highest indicators of relative deprivation and evidence possessing populist and anti-democratic tendencies. The decline in status of the regions and their communities with the closure of coal, steel and related heavy industries has led to them being characterised as “left behind”. The economic fragility residents experience in terms of job and income security was worsened by the global economic crisis, Covid-19 pandemic and further economic shocks relating to Brexit and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Many of these communities thus look to populist and far-right movements which employ anti-elitist rhetoric while implicitly promising to restore the greatness and pride these communities once experienced.
This paper explores how nostalgia is embedded in the everyday cognition of residents of post-industrial communities and so how this makes them open to manipulation by nostalgic populist rhetoric. The data, from the DFG/AHRC funded project Voices from the Periphery, explores the socio-economic and political perceptions of residents of regions in the North of England and East of Germany. Utilising the methodology of storytelling cafés, we ask residents of post-industrial communities to reflect on their lifeworlds in the past, present and future. Millennials and over-50s share a sense of pride in the past, in the hard physical labour of themselves, their peers or their ancestors, and their contribution to the national economies. They equally share the sense that the regions were let down: as industries declined, there was no plan to stabilise the economies of the region. Residents display an apathy towards politics and a hopelessness towards the future following years of neglect by a range of governing parties. These reflections, founded on learned attitudes embedded in experience, provide a fertile space for anti-elitist populist thinking to flourish which can then be manipulated to reject centrist, democratic forces. In revealing the voices of the residents in deindustrialised towns and villages, we demonstrate how lifeworld experiences of high relative deprivation can act as a destabilising force on democracies.
