Paper Short Abstract:

The paper examines the silence of deindustrialization, the affective and embodied experiences of industrial workers in post-socialist Slovenia. By presenting silence in the context of structural violence that has led to the embodiment of repressed traumatic experiences, it aims to explore how silence can be analysed in relation to the body and affects in the field.

Paper Abstract:

The paper points at different forms of silence that I have encountered in my research on deindustrialization in post-socialist Slovenia over the last 20 years. The focus is on the intimate and social experiences of industrial workers, their bodily sensations and psychological feelings of dispossession (material, political, social, symbolic and physical). Silence is seen as a constitutive part of remembering and forgetting in deindustrialization but I want to examine it in relation to workers’ pain and structural violence. The case study of the 2009 garment factory collapse in Slovenia will be used to discuss the ethnographic dilemma of how to analytically capture silence in the field and interpret the difficulties in articulating the experience of shock. The thesis is that the silencing of the sewing machines was a structural violence that led to the embodiment of repressed feelings that manifested in various symptoms and damaged the workers’ bodies and minds, with far-reaching effects also on the younger generation and the wider local community (Lee Linkon 2018). The violence continues in the daily lives of the workers after the closure of the factory, as their struggles and feelings have been silenced.