Made in Barnsley: A Hauntological Approach to Understanding Youth Belonging in the Former Coalfields

Whilst most visible landscapes and toxic effects of deindustrialisation have waned over time (Linkon, 2018), the affective legacies are complex and far-reaching, perhaps especially for future generations of youth growing up in ‘disconnected’ and/or ‘unknown’ past-present temporalities. In partnership with the Yorkshire and Humber Youth Work Unit, this paper draws on initial data from a three-year project that aims to understand working-class lads’ experiences of identity and belonging within three spheres: education, community, and opportunity. Working with over 100 lads (11-25-years-old) from the former coalfields of Barnsley, the research aims to co-produce knowledge on their lived experiences in order to transform youth conditions, experiences, and policy. This paper focuses on data from Phase 1 and utilises the notion of social haunting to examine how modes of ‘being, doing and belonging’, traditionally associated with coalmining communities, continues to shape the lads’ experiences of, and attitudes towards, the three spheres. For these lads, their present is not disembodied from the past but is often an ‘unknown’ history and understanding these experiences, we argue, requires a socio-historically informed lens to see and know the historical dimensions. Drawing on youth narratives, data shows that rather than dissipating over time, the effects of deindustrialisation remain, opening up cracks in the everyday for ghosts to emerge with murmurs of goodness, and tensions and ‘discomforts’ (Doherty & de St Croix, 2024). We suggest that spectres of policy and practice of the yet-to-come must engage with spectralities and linkages of the past, present and futurity of youth – those at the the ‘chalkface’ – and that understanding ghosts has important implications for community funding and spaces, youth education, training and employment, and youthwork and policy.