DePOT’s Industrial Closure Working Group’s is proud to announce that the culminating volume of our collective efforts, entitled The Politics of Industrial Closure: Transnational and Comparative History, has now been published by the University of Toronto Press. It is the first volume to be published in UTP’s new “Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time” Book Series. The book will be officially launched at the DePOT conference in Montreal this June.

The cover art is thanks to Francesca Marconi, one of our first Artists-in-residence. All of the other chapters are co-authored – a fine example of collaborative research and writing. As the project’s first working group, its focus is more narrowly on the six core countries in Western Europe (Italy, France, Germany, UK) and North America (US, Canada). Subsequent working group volumes will expand outward, as has our project since it began in the depths of the pandemic in 2020.

The contributors include Stefan Berger, Steven High, Francesca Marconi, Gilda Zazzara, Marion Fontaine, Lauren Laframboise, Naomi Petropoulos, Pierre Toussenot, Pascal Raggi, Rebecca Dolgoy, James Rhodes, James Pattison, Stefan Moitra, Petra Dolata, Rebekah Chatellier, Andrew Perchard, Dimitry Anastakis, Stefan Backius, Greg Wilson, Lachlan MacKinnon, Emily Gann, Matthew Penney, Fred Burrill, Michael Farrenkopf, and Stefan Siemer.

This follows up our earlier special issue of the journal Labor History which showcased a number of other articles coming out of our collective endeavours as well as Indranil Chakraborty and Steven High edited collection Deindustrialization and Economic Restructuring in Post-Reform India.

The next volumes in the Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time Book Series will be the edited volumes of the Gender Working Group (edited by Jackie Clarke and Piyusha Chatterjee) and the Race, Populism and the Left Working Group (edited by Marion Fontaine and Steven High; with a special issue coming out under the stewardship of James Rhodes, Amber Ward and Marion Fontaine).

Congratulations everyone!