Thanks to Sheila and everyone at the Jubilee Project in Burslem for creating these cards of their memories and hopes for the past, present and future.
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A comic created by Jim Medway, based on our Ghost Lab with young people from Hackney Voices of Youth at the AHRC Utopia Festival.
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A few examples of the writing and images produced in the N. Staffs Ghost Lab
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Our North Staffs Ghost Lab took place at New Vic Theatre on 28th June 2016. An amazing and inspiring afternoon!
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More work from the Utopia Ghost Lab - thanks to everyone who came along for your contributions!
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Some of the wonderful creative work produced in the Utopia Ghost Lab.Some of the wonderful creative work produced in the Utopia Ghost Lab.
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The Utopia Ghost Lab - tarot reading, creative writing, drawing and banner making…
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Pictures of our stall at the Utopia Fair at Somerset House, 24th-26th June. Thanks to everyone who came along to say hello :)
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My wife recently attended a lecture at Durham University by Dr Geoff Bright, a research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University. The lecture was on the subject of social haunting in the ex-mining communities of South Yorkshire. Geoff displayed some images to accompany the talk, my wife saw a similarity between those images and ones I’d been taking for a few years around the area where we live in Durham. My wife decided to send me a copy of Geoff’s article ‘The lady is not returning!’: educational precarity and a social haunting in the UK coalfields and Geoff a link to my photography website.
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Geoff and I recently attended the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in the United States to present a paper about the Social Haunting project. Afterwards, I stayed on for a few days and went to Milwaukee where I visited the ‘Man [sic] at Work’ collection at the Grohmann Museum.
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Avery Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of “Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination”
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Stuart Crosthwaite on the right hand side of the picture, holding the South Yorkshire Unite Community banner at the Hatfield Colliery ‘anniversary march back” in March 2015. The pit was closed a few weeks later
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“I don’t have time to write an appraisal of the Social Haunting project, I need to set up a Facebook event page for a local protest against benefit sanctions” I’m thinking as I write this now. Then there’s the meeting with ex-miners and present day refugees I’m hosting in 6 days…need to call so and so, arrange travel for Ali and his friends. It was like this last autumn too. I wondered then if I could spare the time to go to the Ghost Labs in Barnsley for poetry, landscape archaeology and comic workshops. After all, there’s work to be done…
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Could I contribute a little bit of a snippet from a poem I’d already written?
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George Street in Langwith, Derbyshire, where Geoff Bright was born. Both sets of Geoff’s grandparents lived on this street. Langwith became the epitome of the ruined pit village in the 1990s when it was know as ‘The Bronx’
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In this final piece that I write for the social haunting blog, I want take the opportunity to invite my mother in as some kind of spectral witness to the work that we’ve been doing – to see if it, as it were, passes muster, through me, for her. My mother, Harriet Limb, born in one of the two slummy ‘pit rows’ in a Derbyshire pit village, Langwith, in Derbyshire in 1916, would have been 100 years old this year. In fact, she died on May Day in 1996 after a three year long decline at the hands of Alzheimer’s, lost in ferocious rebellion against some on-going grievance in the darkness inside her head.
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This is the final radio documentary Social Haunting: talking to the ghosts of our past commissioned as part of the project. It was broadcast in early February on community stations, Sheffield Live, Sine FM and Crescent FM covering both the Lancashire and South Yorkshire regions of the project.
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I’m currently writing an article about the comics Ghost Labs. Here’s a short extract that I think makes sense on it’s own. Do comment if you have any thoughts…
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