Lisa Taylor

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

Research outcomes

Taylor, L. (2025).

Threads of labour: Tapestry of an ex-industrial community. Manchester University Press.

Areas of interest

Media Class Television Cinema Music Local Communities Deindustrialisation UK Affect Ethnography

Cohort

MCF5

Biography

Lisa Taylor is Reader in Cultural Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Leeds Beckett University, UK. Her new research monograph ‘Threads of Labour: tapestry of an ex-industrial community’ (2025, Manchester University Press) tackles the impact of socio-economic trends and policies on local communities and the devaluing of places ‘left-behind’ by deindustrialisation. Arguing for care provision, she applies creative methods to the real-life problems of post-industrial areas where communities are eroded or divided.

In 2018-20 she was Co-I on a Leverhulme/BA project examining how space and place act to stigmatise benefits claimants in Factual Welfare Television. Lisa is Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

She has overarching interests in media/cultural representations of class, gender, space and place; autoethnography, affect and embodiment; leisure practices and lifestyle culture. Her book ‘A Taste for Gardening: classed and gendered practices’ (2008, Routledge) explored the relationship between British garden lifestyle media and the classed aesthetics of gardening. She has published (with Jayne Raisborough and Katherine Harrison) on the visual grammar of tv editing and social stigma in Sociological Research Online and on the role of art in agonistic politics in post-Brexit Britain (with Nick Cox) in the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Biographical details correct as of 23.09.25