hrvatski

From industrial ruins to post-industrial hubs: changing landscape of work in Eu periphery

The presentation is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out for over a 10-year period in the picturesque town of Sisak, not far from the Croatia’s capital city of Zagreb. For the last half a century, Sisak has been perceived as a regional industrial center that provided ample opportunities for industrial workers, as a place to work, live and organize harmonious life for ever-growing socialist working-class families. The research project revolved around the changes triggered by post-socialist transformation, war, deindustrialization, and other urgencies and immobilities than befallen upon the citizens of this postindustrial suburban town. One of the renown Yugoslav steelwork industry, the city's Iron factory was the most prominent feature that, along with the oil refinery, generated wealth and prosperity for the better part of the socialist era. Here, I will try to present a scrapbook of stories (and images) encountered during the fieldwork in an industrial neighborhood. Those include stories of industrial nostalgia, loss of financial security, spatial ruination, melancholic stories of settling with the past, present and future, stories of anger, revolt and disaffection of the generation X and Millennials. Today's lecture will feature research findings on the postindustrial era of once great industrial town. In order to show the workings of the local post-industrial ethnography, to grasp the fading, evolving and emerging phenomena, I will also discuss the conceptual framework that had to include the backward- and forward-moving (life)-worlds as well as (life)-worlds staying still.

deindustrialisation, transformation of work, Sisak, past, present and future lifeworlds

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