The Working Man's Game: The Football Clubs of the Midlands and North-West as a Case Study of Post-Industrial Heritage

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This project focusses on the football clubs of the North-West and the Midlands as a case study to shift our pre-eminent frameworks for defining and understanding post-industrial heritage itself. Accordant to a post-processual working definition of cultural heritage, concerned with ritualistic projection of meaning by various interest groups over materiality, this project defines football clubs as post-industrial relics and institutions of "living social heritage". Using an analytical framework based on three fundamental functions of post-industrial heritage, namely place-making, reconstruction and appropriation, it shall be shown that football clubs foster topophilic place identities, reconstruct and sustain imagined industrial communities in a post-industrial context and contest emergent mutations of the Authorised Heritage Discourse, ultimately providing ontological security against the trauma of deindustrialisation. In turn, this will suggest a more general need to restructure and redefine nostalgia as a multi-faceted, contingent critical process and re-centre continuity overdisjuncture in future studies of post-industrial heritage. Conceptualising heritage as a polysemic cultural process, questioning traditional centres of expertise, exploring heritage's dissonance, focusing on the lived experience of working class people and exhibiting theoretical interdisciplinarity, this project is located at the juncture of "New Working Class Studies" and "Critical Heritage Studies."