‘Rethinking camaraderie as emotional practices: deindustrialisation and deskilling in South Yorkshire coalfields, 1980s-2000s’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Historical and sociological scholarship on the British coalfields has been driven by a sustained interest in community and class. Consequently, however, a focus on community can subsume camaraderie/comradeship as a category of historical analysis and its potential value as a framework for understanding change and continuity in practice, experience, and identity. Drawing on methodological tools from the history of emotions, and oral history interviews with ex-miners, this article employs the concept of ‘emotional practices’ to define camaraderie as a learnt, embodied, and affective workplace practice. Arising out of class processes, camaraderie constituted a workplace skill, important in communicating and mobilising ways of feeling and being, which oscillated between integration and alienation, alleviating and aggravating work experiences. It argues men’s lamentations over the loss of camaraderie should be understood as a profound emotional experience of deskilling, affecting how workers navigated and negotiated work and workplace transitions, and communicated with their co-workers and to themselves who they are. By integrating the history of work and the history of emotions into an analysis of camaraderie, it offers a contribution on the lasting effects of deindustrialisation on the body, experience, and identity, and towards a new way of conceptualising camaraderie as ‘emotional practices’.