More event details coming soon.

From the publisher:

Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, the book investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s. Women's labour and tastes were business critical to the production and sale of Firths carpets. Drawing on the author's personal connection to the village, an ethnographic sensibility and novel research techniques, ex-worker responses to a village radically altered by ruination are explored. Ex-workers felt nostalgia for the dignity of work and a sense of homesickness in a village ghosted by industrial spectres of the past. Threads of Labour argues that left-behind deindustrialised places require acts of social re-making if their communities are to survive.

Lisa Taylor is Reader in Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University. She was an ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2021, for her project Landscapes of Loss: Revaluing Labour, Remaking Community.

Lisa will be joined by Tim Strangleman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. Further speakers to be confirmed.