Making Cultures of Solidarity

Diarmaid Kelliher is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geographical & Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, UK.

‘[T]he book is a rare example of concise writing and meticulous research… an important book that can be read by both seasoned labour scholars and undergraduate students… The rigorous archival methods, nuanced understandings of class, and measured optimism for resistance combined with analytical maturity are truly "generative" of new ways of seeing struggle.’Steven Tufts, York University, Canada, writing in Antipode‘[An] exemplary study of the 1984–5 strike in defence of jobs, collieries and communities… [Kelliher] demonstrates that the strike was sustained by multiple alliances constructed by miners at pit- and community-level with a wide constellation of supporters, many of them in London. This is the book’s outstanding contribution, framing the strike as largely a mobilisation ‘from below’, which imperfectly synthesised labour-movement politics with social-movement politics.’Jim Phillips, University of Glasgow, UK, writing in The London Journal‘In troubled times, Making Cultures of Solidarity is restorative. It should emerge as a key text across career stages in a more historically-attentive Urban Studies that recognises the crucial roles that organised labour and its dissolution play in understanding urban social infrastructures, and how translocal and intersectional cultures of solidarity can be (re)made toward just urban futures.’Jay Emery, University of Sheffield UK, writing in Urban Studies‘As Kelliher documents, the story of support for the strike illustrates a left politics that was instinctively intersectional because so were the lives and identities of its practitioners.’Rhian E. Jones, writing in Tribune

• Introduction 1. Conceptualising Cultures of Solidarity 2. ‘We’ve always stood with anybody who wanted to fight’: Mutual Solidarity in the Long 1970s 3. ‘We’re all in Thatcher’s sinking ship’: Class and Deindustrialisation 4. ‘Like little soviets’: Infrastructures of Solidarity 5. ‘What it meant to us about equality’: Gender, Race and Solidarity 6. Sexuality and Solidarity: Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners 7. ‘Someone else’s dubious battle’: The Limits of Solidarity 8. ‘The world doesn’t end’: After the Miners’ Strike Conclusion