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Staff Profiles

Dr Andy Clark

Research Associate in Oral History

Background

I'm based within the Newcastle Oral History Unit & Collective, and am responsible for designing and leading innovative research projects that cut across disciplinary boundaries. My interests are broadly related to: socio-economic change through the process of deindustrialisation; worker mobilisation and collective action; intersectional labour history; dynamics of memory and remembering; ageing and wellbeing in later life; and community impacts of organised crime.


Funding and Awards

  • Economic & Social Research Council, New Investigator Award, 2020 (£292,000)
  • British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant, 2019 (£9,849)
  • British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award, 2018 (12,654)

  • Nominated for Most Enthusiastic Teacher in the University, University of Strathclyde Students’ Association, 2017.
  • Awarded a funded internship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council at BBC Scotland, 2016.                      
  • Twice awarded the Scottish Oral History Centre ‘Neil Rafeek Prize’ in oral history (undergraduate, 2011, postgraduate, 2015).


Education

  • PhD in History. University of Strathclyde, 2017
  • MA in History. Central Michigan University, 2012
  • BA in History with First Class Honours, 2011


Research

My research examines the full range of lived experiences through the process of deindustrialisation. My first monograph – Fighting Deindustrialisation (forthcoming, October 2022, Liverpool UP) – seeks to complicate our understandings of manufacturing closure by returning to the industrial workplace, and in particular the feminine workplace. Through a case study analysis of opposition to factory closure in 1980s Scotland, I argue that notions of ‘smokestack nostalgia’ fundamentally downplay the experience of women workers in industry, and that urges to move away from workplace analyses risks marginalising neglected perspectives on industrial work and the effects of shutdown.

Recently, I have analysed the ways in which deindustrialisation continues to impact working-class communities, particularly through unemployment, addiction, deprivation, and organised crime. This research emerged from a highly significant Scottish Government report that I co-authored based on national fieldwork analyses.

In 2021 I launched a new project with funding from the ESRC that considers the relationships between deindustrialisation and wellbeing in ageing. This transdisciplinary study seeks to break new theoretical ground in assessing the ways in which drastic socio-economic change contribute to cumulative dis/advantage in later life. The study adopts a novel approach to cohort recruitment, through collaborating with the ongoing Thousand Families of Newcastle longitudinal birth study, which has been running since 1947.

I am also interested in oral histories of difficult and distressing events across the life course, although these are events that occurred decades previously rather than instantaneous disaster oral history. Since 2018, I have led a new oral history project examining the Lockerbie Disaster, 1988. Working with Dr Colin Atkinson, we interviewed 12 first responders to consider how they reflect on their experiences and how memories change over time.




Publications