Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Clifton EversORCiD
Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.
Polluted Leisure, Memory, and Resigned Activism Violence. Violence everywhere. Dead crabs by the many thousands on the beach. Dead fish too. Sick dogs and concerned owners. Ponds full of tires. The wind sweeping through the wreckage of an abandoned steelworks providing an incessant hum echoing across this post-industrial coastal 'wasteland'. A surfer, shivering, hurriedly pulls and tugs on a neoprene wetsuit as they dance on the snow. A beachcomber hunts for washed up plastics to turn into art as they clamber amidst the sea life apocalypse. Pollution (both legacy and ongoing; both social and material) inescapably shapes relationships between memory and activism on a permanently polluted planet. Drawing on community-based storytelling, more-than-human theory, and creative methodologies in the paper I explore a case study of polluted leisure, memory, and 'resigned activism' in a post-industrial coastal 'shadow place' (Plumwood, 2008). I argue that 'polluted leisure' is a useful lens through which to understand how pollution-as-memory necessitates the formulating of a site-specific 'resigned activism' among residents in post-industrial coastal 'toxic natures' in NE England (Lora-Wainwright, 2017). I argue that the resigned activism is a tactical rather than strategic response to when pollution becomes an omnipresent part of citizen memories, affecting its appearance and subsequently how its inhabitants look, feel, act, and know (De Certeau, 1984).
Author(s): Evers C
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: Communities and Change: Seventh Annual Meeting of the Memory Studies Association (MSA)
Year of Conference: 2023
Print publication date: 03/07/2023
Acceptance date: 31/05/2023
URL: https://msa2023newcastle.dryfta.com/program-schedule
