James Rhodes is a sociologist with affiliations at the University of Manchester and Hiram College in Ohio. He has also previously spent time as a visiting scholar at the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. James has a longstanding interest in deindustrialization, particularly in terms of its relationship to place, identity, and inequality. His work focuses on the situated, lived experiences of deindustrialization and related processes such as depopulation and urban decline. Informed by this interest, he has examined far-right politics and explored the conception of the ‘left behind’ in the North West of England, while also examining forms of urban decline and depopulation in the Rust Belt, and policies related to urban shrinkage. His work within the context of the Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time (DePOT) project will explore the relationship between deindustrialization, place and racialized and classed political identities and subjectivities in the American Rust Belt.
