Social Infrastructure and Left Behind Places
This lecture discusses ‘Social Infrastructure and Left Behind Places’ by authors John Tomaney, Maeve Blackman, Lucy Natarajan, Dimitrios Panayotopoulos-Tsiros, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Myfanwy Taylor. The book explores the making, unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure in ‘left-behind places’. Such places, typically once flourishing industrial communities that have been excluded from recent economic growth, now attract academic and policy attention as sites of a political backlash against globalisation and liberal democracy.

The book focuses on the role of social infrastructure as a key component of this story. Seeking to move beyond a narrowly economistic way of reading ‘left behind places’, the book addresses the understudied affective dimensions of ‘left-behindness’. It develops an analytical framework that emphasises the importance of place attachments and the consequences of their disruption; considers ‘left behind places’ as ‘moral communities’ and the making of social infrastructure as an expression of this; views the unmaking of social infrastructure through the lens of ‘root shock’; and explains efforts at remaking it in terms of the articulation of ‘radical hope’. The analysis builds upon a case study of a former mining community in County Durham, North East England.
Date: 25 April 2024, 18:30 (Thursday, 1st week, Trinity 2024)
Venue: Rewley House, 1-7 Wellington Square OX1 2JA
Venue Details: Lecture Theatre
Speaker: Professor John Tomaney (UCL)
Organising department: Department for Continuing Education
Organiser: Sustainable Urban Development Programme (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: sud@conted.ox.ac.uk
Host: Sustainable Urban Development Programme (University of Oxford)
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/social-infrastructure-and-left-behind-places-tickets-850728902047
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editor: Sarah Cocks