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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Threads of Labour: Tapestry of an Ex-Industrial Community

Threads of Labour: Tapestry of an Ex-Industrial Community

Hardcover

General PhotographyGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 1526166410
ISBN13: 9781526166418
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: Jul 1 2025
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.97
Height: 0.63 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, the book investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s. Women's labour and tastes were business critical to the production and sale of Firths carpets. Drawing on the author's personal connection to the village, an ethnographic sensibility and novel research techniques, ex-worker responses to a village radically altered by ruination are explored. Ex-workers felt nostalgia for the dignity of work and a sense of homesickness in a village ghosted by industrial spectres of the past. Threads of Labour argues that left-behind deindustrialised places require acts of social re-making if their communities are to survive.

Also from

Taylor, Lisa

Also in

General Sociology