Dr Lisa Taylor

Mid-Career Fellow 2021

Landscapes of Loss: Revaluing Labour, Remaking Community

This project explores what happens to communities when once thriving mills, offering employment to company villages, are closed down and demolished. It approaches this deindustrialised landscape as a site of trauma and loss. It brings together psychoanalysis, cultural geography and non-representational theory to develop a photography project of hand gestures used in noisy mills, as a way of healing and rebuilding communities. It aims to develop interdisciplinary, creative approaches to the real-life problems of post-industrial areas where communities are eroded or divided and argues for care provision and healing opportunities.

More information

Areas of interest

Media Class Television Cinema Music Local Communities Deindustrialisation UK Affect Ethnography

Cohort

MCF5

Biography

Lisa Taylor has published on lifestyle media, reality television, popular cinema and music. Her book A Taste for Gardening (2008) was about the relationship between British garden lifestyle media and the classed aesthetics of gardening.

Her recent work tackles the impacts of wider socio-economic policies upon local communities – the devaluing of spaces ‘left behind’ by deindustrialisation and persistent negative images of the North. Drawing on the interdisciplinary turn to spatiality and affect and using participatory methodologies, she examines peoples’ affective interactions with place.

Her current project ‘Landscapes of Loss’ uses sensuous ethnographic encounters with ex-worker memories of the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial textile village. Arguing for care provision and healing opportunities, she is developing creative approaches to the real-life problems of post-industrial areas where communities are eroded or divided.

Biographical details correct as of 16.01.25