Description

Since the 1970s, manufacturing has been described by tropes of deindustrialization and decline in the UK and beyond. Over the last few years however, manufacturing – in the way of reindustrialization – is back on political agendas across the world. This roundtable brings together trade unionists, academics, novelists and workers from the UK, Europe and India to discuss what they make of such political calls, and how they anticipate manufacturing spaces, work and workers to change in an era of 'bringing jobs back'.

We ask questions of interest to a wide audience: what jobs are being brought back? From where? Why, where and who is doing these jobs? For how long and in what conditions? We dwell on what an 'anthropology of manufacturing' can offer with its focus on ethnographic, grounded and nuanced perspectives on experiences of manufacturing work. We question the usefulness of the term 'reindustrialization' and the linear genealogies of deindustrialization and reindustrialization, given the informal, invisible ways in which manufacturing work has actually continued since and after factories closed in the 1970s. Furthermore, even as its return may be a sign of manufacturing's inevitability to national economic and political stability, manufacturing is also now in the twenty first century, firmly associated as one of the major polluters and causes of environmental harm for the world. Situating manufacturing in this paradox of the economic inevitability and environmental harm, we ask what the growth of manufacturing jobs would mean for the economy and environment of the UK and beyond.