Amber Ward is a PhD student in Modern History at the University of St Andrews in Fife, Scotland. Her thesis enquires into the relationship between deindustrialization, and cultural and ideological transformation. Focussing on the ex-industrial communities of Central Fife, and using oral history, her project gathers historical memories belonging to a wide breadth of ex-industrial community categories, including those of ethnolinguistic, gendered, and LGBTQ+ community forums. Her work studies the phenomenon of deindustrialization outside of contexts related to economic production, and considers Marxist feminist, decolonizing and post-structuralist approaches to deindustrialization studies. Prior to her PhD, Amber completed undergraduate (2018) and masters’ (2019) degrees in Modern History at the University of St Andrews. From 2019-2020 she spent a year working as a project coordinator and researcher on several community projects and exhibitions in Fife.
Project statement
Community, Identity and Economic Change in Central Fife’s Ex-Industrial Communities after 1985
Focussing on the ex-industrial communities of Central Fife, Scotland, Amber’s thesis uses oral history to enquire into different perceptions of the recent past held amongst and within a diverse range of community organizations. Her thesis considers the perspectives of a wide breadth of ex-industrial identities, including ethnolinguistic, gendered and LGBTQ+ community categories. She is supervised jointly by Dr Malcolm Petrie (St Andrews), Prof Jim Phillips (Glasgow) and Dr Ewan Gibbs (Glasgow), and is grateful to the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities (AHRC) for fully funding her project.
