Sam Fraser is a PhD student in Sociology at Lund University, Sweden. He holds a BA (Hons) in Sociology from the University of Birmingham, UK (2011), and an MSc in International Development (LUMID) from Lund University (2020). His previous research has focused on the displacement and marginalisation of Roma communities, examining how they construct livelihoods and resist delegitimisation and securitisation. His master’s thesis, on the overrepresentation of Roma in urban informality in Romania, was awarded the Martin Alexanderson Research Scholarship for Human Rights Studies (2019) by the Raoul Wallenberg Institute. He is currently part of the ERC-funded project ENDINGs – Towards a Theory of Endings in Innovation Studies. His doctoral project investigates how industrial transitions and decline affect communities, exploring how the enactment of ‘endings’, through deindustrialisation or industrial transformation, shapes people’s relationships to the past, their lives in the present, and the futures they imagine. The research focuses on the intertwined fates of steel and coal in the UK, with particular attention to County Durham and Port Talbot.
Temporalities of endings
My project investigates the temporality of endings in industrial transitions, focusing on the British steel industry in Port Talbot and the Durham Miners’ Gala. As we pursue industrial transitions, scholarship and policy often underestimate the durability of communities and identities forged within industrial sociotechnical systems. Understanding how endings affect communities, and how communities actively shape endings, is critical to managing just transitions. Endings are ambiguous. They imply finality, yet they unfold over long periods, rippling into both the past and the future. Industries don’t simply disappear; communities respond, resist, remember, and reimagine. My research examines how communities respond to destabilisation, decline, and discontinuation – how they make sense of the present, negotiate loss, and imagine possible futures. I argue that understanding these temporal dynamics: how endings are ongoing, recalibrate relationships to the past, and constrain or enable future possibilities, is crucial for enabling just and effective transitions. Port Talbot, facing the transition of its steelworks and an uncertain future, represents an ending in process. The Durham Miners’ Gala, which remains a thriving annual festival despite the end of coal mining locally, offers a comparative reference point further along the timeline. Together, these cases reveal how communities navigate different stages of ending: immediate responses to uncertainty, sustaining collective identity, and developing resources for imagining post-industrial futures. This challenges dominant narratives of “creative destruction” in innovation and transition studies, showing instead that industrial endings are not clean breaks but messy, durable processes that fundamentally shape what futures become possible. The project draws on ethnography, interviews, archival analysis, discourse analysis, and participatory methods to trace how communities manage transitions, loss, and possibility.
