Landscapes of Loss: Responses to Altered Landscapes in an Ex-Industrial textile Community

Geographically located at the heart of Carpetvillage in West Yorkshire, Carpetmakers had once been a thriving manufacturer of fine woven carpets since the late 1880s. From my own experience of growing up there in the 1970s, its inhabitants had held a sense of ‘communal being-ness’ through the shared experience of living there and of making carpets. After the factory was closed, Carpet Mill was demolished in 2002, leaving a void where there had once been a handsome Victorian building. Interested in responses to architectural, spatial, and sensuous change in an ex-industrial landscape, this article asks: what were the subjective consequences for the affective ties that hold together an ex-industrial community? Using sensuous ethnographic mobile methods, the study draws on ex-Carpetmakers employees and local residents. The research found nostalgic memories of Carpetmakers as a paternalistic employer operating in a thriving and largely self-sufficient community. Photographs were collected from respondents, which chart a vast number of social clubs and events that offered an important dimension to the ‘way of life’ offered to workers in this ‘company village’. It found that while the importance of works buildings is acknowledged by writers on de-industrialization, missing from their accounts is an embodied analysis of how people interact in situ with landscapes of demolition. Respondents told of the emotional trauma of the demolition process, the effects of spatial change through the erasure of the village’s architectural past and the almost total decline of a community which, for them, no longer holds a sense of place. The decline in the social structures of an industrial community meant that ageing ex-workers and residents found it difficult to generate communal ties with newcomers to the village

Prisoners of the Capitalist Machine: Captivity and the Corporate Engineer

This chapter will focus on how engineering practice is conditioned by an economic system which promotes production for profit and economic growth as an end in itself. As such it will focus on the notion of the captivity of engineering which emanates from features of the economic system. By drawing on Critical Realism and a Marxist literature, and by focusing on the issues of safety and sustainability (in particular the issue of climate change), it will examine the extent to which disasters and workplace accidents result from the economic imperative for profitable production and how efforts by engineers to address climate change are undermined by an on-going commitment to growth. It will conclude by arguing that the structural constraints on engineering practice require new approaches to teaching engineers about ethics and social responsibility. It will argue that Critical Realism offers a framework for the teaching of engineering ethics which would pay proper attention to the structural context of engineers work without eliminating the possibility of engineers working for radical change