Amber Ward is an early career researcher affiliated with the University of St Andrews. Her research studies the relationship between deindustrialization and popular ideology in Britain and the European Union. Her PhD, completed at St Andrews in 2024, was a cultural history of deindustrialization in Central Fife, Scotland. Her PhD was fully funded by an AHRC doctoral training partnership award and was shortlisted for the 2025 Samuel Rutherford Prize. In 2022 she was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, based at the Institute for European Studies. She has published in Oral History, Scottish Left Review, and Contretemps.
Project Statement:
Cultural Histories of Deindustrialization
My research de-centers employment in its analysis of community change over time. I conduct unstructured oral history interviews, usually with community organizations from a range of backgrounds. I’m interested in applying alternative methodologies to understand the period of deindustrialization, especially post-structuralist, Marxist feminist, and decolonising lenses.
You can find them in:
- Gendering Deindustrialization Studies “Investigation Community, Identity and Economic Change in the Ex-mining Communities of Central Fife after 1985” 42:00-50:00
-
Energy Transitions and Deindustrialization “A Marxist Feminist Approach to understanding Energy Transition in Fife, Scotland” 40:36- 48:20
- DePOT Podcast Episode 2 – Oral History Methodology
