Staff Profiles
Dr Andy Clark
Research Associate in Oral History
- Email: andy.clark@ncl.ac.uk
- Personal Website: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/andyclark/
- Address: Amrstrong Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
- 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).
- PhD in History. University of Strathclyde, 2017
- MA in History. Central Michigan University, 2012
- BA in History with First Class Honours, 2011
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.
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Articles
- Clark A. ‘People just dae wit they can tae get by’: Exploring the half-life of deindustrialisation in a Scottish community. The Sociological Review 2023, 71(2), 332–350.
- Clark A. Workplace occupations in British labour history: Rise, fall, and historical legacies. Labour History Review 2021, 86(1), 1-6.
- Clark A. 'There is nothing there for us and nothing for the future': Deindustrialization and workplace occupation, 1981-1982. Labour History Review 2021, 86(1), 37-61.
- Clark A, Fraser A, Hamilton-Smith N. Networked territorialism: the routes and roots of organised crime. Trends in Organized Crime 2021, 24, 246-262.
- Fraser A, Clark A. Damaged hardmen: Organized crime and the half-life of deindustrialization. British Journal of Sociology 2021, 72(4), 1062-1076.
- Clark A, Gibbs E. Voices of social dislocation, lost work and economic restructuring: Narratives from marginalised localities in the ‘New Scotland’. Memory Studies 2020, 13(1), 39-59.
- Robertson M, Clark A. ‘We Were the Ones Really Doing Something About It’: Gender and Mobilisation against Factory Closure. Work, Employment and Society 2019, 33(2), 336-344.
- Clark A. Collaborating with schools: challenges and opportunities for oral historians. Oral History 2015, 44, 107-115.
- Clark A. And the next thing the chairs barricaded the door’: The Lee Jeans factory occupation, trade unionism and gender in Scotland in the 1980s. Scottish Labour History 2013, 48, 116-134.
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Authored Book
- Clark Andy. Fighting Deindustrialisation: Scottish Women’s Factory Occupations, 1981-1982. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023.
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Book Chapter
- Clark A. Stealing Our Identity and Taking It over to Ireland’: Deindustrialization, Resistance, and Gender in Scotland. In: High, S., Perchard, A., and MacInnon, L, ed. The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017, pp.331-347.
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Report
- Fraser A, Hamilton-Smith N, Clark A, Atkinson C, Graham W, McBride M. Community Experiences of Serious Organised Crime in Scotland - Research Findings. Edinburgh: Scottish Government, 2018.