Steven High
Biographic Data
| ID | 295533 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steven High |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steven |
| FAMILY NAME | High |
| SIGNATURE | HIGH S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Concordia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7224-4133 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 61 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Irreconcilable differences? Organized labour and the global politics of deindustrialization
This article considers the global politics of deindustrialization within the trade union movement during the 1970s and early 1980s. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which represented non-Communist union centrals, sought to forge a one-world strategy focused on multinational corporations, rather than imports, in order to reconcile often-conflicting regional interests as countries industrialized or deindustrialized. One country…
You Had a Job for Life: Story of a Company Town
Discours présidentiel: Les historien.ne.s au présent
Le discours présidentiel de Steven High, prononcé à l’Université York en mai 2023, aborde de nombreuses questions auxquelles notre discipline est confrontée et ce que signifie être historien.ne à l’heure actuelle. Malgré la polarisation politique extrême de notre époque, il exprime son admiration pour le courage de nombreux historiens et de nombreuses historiennes qui continuent de dire la vérité au pouvoir, même au prix des risques considérables…
Presidential Address: Historians in the Present
Steven High’s presidential address, delivered at York University in May 2023, grapples with many of the issues facing our discipline and what it means to be a historian in the present. Despite the extreme political polarization of our time, he expressed admiration at the courage of so many historians who continue to speak truth to power, even at considerable risk to themselves. He also addresses the structural violence of precarity within our dis…
Cold War Colonialism and Suburban Innocence
The informal empire of twentieth-century U.S. military bases around the world has garnered considerable scholarly attention. Okinawa, the Panama Canal, Guantanamo (Cuba), Trinidad, South Korea, and Bermuda, to name just a few, have attracted sustained historical interest as have the various “friendly invasions” of allied countries. David Vine’s Base Nation and Mark Gillem’s America Town come immediately to mind as does the earlier work of Stephen…
Worker ownership in North America: The cases of Weirton Steel (West Virginia) and Algoma Steel (Ontario)
During the last quarter of the 20th century, worker ownership emerged as a popular option for North American workers trying to save their mills or factories from closing. Most of these efforts eventually failed, sometimes at great financial cost to workers who gambled away their savings or pensions. Yet a few worker buyouts succeeded over the long term. This article examines two of these success stories, one on either side of the Canada-United St…
Negotiating job security and capital investments in response to deindustrialization: The case of Canada’s auto sector
Job security has always been a paramount concern for the trade union movement. This article explores the ways that unions used collective bargaining to gain a measure of job security for their members in the face of deindustrialization as unionized factories in North America began to close in large numbers after the 1970s. These new measures included advance notice, severance pay, plant closing moratoria, restrictions placed on plant movements, t…
“With Iron We Conquer”: Deindustrialization, Settler Colonialism, and the Last Train out of Schefferville, Quebec
The Iron Ore Company of Canada announced the closure of its mine in Schefferville, Quebec, on 2 November 1982, throwing the town’s future in doubt. Its slow agony made headlines across Canada for weeks, months, and even years. This article considers how the politics of deindustrialization got bound up in the national project of the settler-colonial state and the political ambitions of politicians, given that the company was led by Brian Mulroney,…
Samir Shaheen-Hussain, Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada
Journal Article Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada Get access Samir Shaheen-Hussain, Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. Pp. xxxii + 326. $37.95. Hdbk. ISBN 978-0-2280-0360-1. Steven High Steven High Department of History, Concordia University [email protected] Sear…
The Radical Origins of the Deindustrialization Thesis: From Dependency to Capital Flight and Community Abandonment
Deindustrialization became a pressing political issue and an object of research almost simultaneously in North America. This article inquires into the intellectual origins and radical roots of the deindustrialization thesis in Canada and the United States. Though the two countries share much in common, their distinctive formulations of the deindustrial problem in the 1970s and 1980s reflected key economic and political differences between them. R…
Deindustrialization in Canada: New Perspectives
The post-1945 decades are frequently remembered as a period of unionized prosperity.The French call these years "les trentes glorieuses," the British call them the "long boom," and American historian Jefferson Cowie has referred to this period as the "Great Exception" in a longer history of capitalism. 1 Our understanding of these years as exceptional is only possible, however, with the knowledge of what comes next.The wrenching economic changes …
A fruitless exercise? The political struggle to compel corporations to justify factory closures in Canada
This paper examines the political history of the failed struggle to require companies to justify their plant closing decisions in Canada’s industrial heartland of Ontario. Demands for the public review of plant closing decisions began, locally, in the auto town of Windsor in the 1950s and 1960s and reached Toronto with the closure of Dunlop Tire in 1970. Another wave of closures struck in 1980, this time reaching deep into rural and small-town On…
The “Normalized Quiet of Unseen Power”: Recognizing the Structural Violence of Deindustrialization as Loss
This article explores the structural violence of deindustrialization and the urban losses that result. It is a global story of mass displacement and dispossession but also an intensely local one that has devastated the working-class. But much of this history is submerged under a dominant, postindustrial, discourse that instills not only a sense of inevitability but of progress and where the ravages of deindustrialization, when recognized at all, …
Loss and the City: A Special Issue
Constructing Industrial Pasts: Heritage, Historical Culture and Identity in Regions Undergoing Structural Economic Transformation, ed. Stefan Berger
Most studies of industrial heritage focus on specific sites with little regard for the wider politics of industrial heritage in deindustrialised areas. This volume demands that we go beyond this narrow focus and move towards regional studies and draw trans-regional comparisons. To that end, the collection (edited by Stefan Berger) offers us a series of regional case-studies from across Europe as well as two chapters on China and one on Australia.…
Alessandro Portelli: Une Vie Passée À Écouter
Ce dialogue inédit entre deux spécialistes étrangers de l'histoire orale et des mondes ouvriers est centré sur les deux grands terrains d'enquête industriels d'Alessandro Portelli : la ville sidérurgique de Terni, dans l'Ombrie italienne, et le comté minier de Harlan, dans les Appalaches. Revenant sur ces deux fresques magistrales - They Say in Harlan County. An Oral History (2011) et Biography of an Industrial Town. Terni, Italy, 1831-2014 (2017…
Introductionlived and Remembered: Social Change through the Prism of Activist Life
INTRODUCTION Lived and Remembered: Social Change through the Prism of Activist Life LANA DEE POVITZ AND STEVEN HIGH∗ ONE OF THE TRUISMS of social movement history is that change never just happens. It has to be diligently, painstakingly fought for, with each victory lifted up and each defeat honestly faced for future wisdom. As historians of social movements, we are always edging as close as we can to the warm-blooded specifics of how change gets…
Le changement social à travers le prisme du militantisme vécu et remémoré
Le changement social à travers le prisme du militantisme vécu et remémoré Lana Dee Povitz (bio) and Steven High (bio) L'UN DES TRUISMES de l'histoire des mouvements sociaux est que le changement n'arrive jamais par hasard. Il faut faire preuve de diligence et se donner du mal pour l'obtenir, célébrer chaque victoire et envisager honnêtement chaque défaite pour pouvoir en tirer des leçons par la suite. En tant qu'historiens ou historiennes des mou…
Lived and Remembered: Social Change through the Prism of Activist Life
Lived and Remembered:Social Change through the Prism of Activist Life Lana Dee Povitz (bio) and Steven High (bio) ONE OF THE TRUISMS of social movement history is that change never just happens. It has to be diligently, painstakingly fought for, with each victory lifted up and each defeat honestly faced for future wisdom. As historians of social movements, we are always edging as close as we can to the warm-blooded specifics of how change gets ma…
Introduction Le Changement Social À Travers Le Prisme Du Militantisme Vécu Et Remémoré
INTRODUCTION Le changement social à travers le prisme du militantisme vécu et remémoré LANA DEE POVITZ ET STEVEN HIGH∗ L’UN DES TRUISMES de l’histoire des mouvements sociaux est que le changement n’arrive jamais par hasard. Il faut faire preuve de diligence et se donner du mal pour l’obtenir, célébrer chaque victoire et envisager honnêtement chaque défaite pour pouvoir en tirer des leçons par la suite. En tant qu’historiens ou historiennes des mo…
Interlocking Lives: Employment Mobility and Family Fixity in Three Gentrifying Neighbourhoods of Montreal
This article explores the relationship between employment mobility, family fixity, and gentrification in the lives of 36 residents in and extended commuters to Montreal's southwest borough. Once described as the birthplace of industry in Canada, the neighbourhoods of Saint-Henri, Little Burgundy and Point Saint-Charles have undergone sweeping changes in recent decades. Inner-city areas are not necessarily where one expects to find mobile workers,…
The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place
Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place
(De-)Industrial Heritage
The radical restructuring of the international division of labor has meant that huge swaths of Europe and North America have experienced painful deindustrialization since the 1960s. In itself, this is nothing new, as capitalist development has always been geographically uneven.1 It is also a global phenomenon, with newly industrialized areas experiencing decline soon after the initial areas.2 What differed in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was the s…
The Emotional Fallout of Deindustrialization in Detroit
Sociologist Beverley Skeggs argues that the shift from redistributive politics to the politics of recognition has placed considerable emphasis on the “individual morally authorizing themselves through their own experience.” Indeed, Skeggs claims that “the wounded attachment is premised on the belief that the experience of pain, hurt and oppression provides greater epistemological authority to speak.” If wounding and pain become the measure of inj…
The Wounds of Class”: A Historiographical Reflection on the Study of Deindustrialization, 1973–2013
This article examines 40 years of multi‐disciplinary scholarship on deindustrialization in North America and the United Kingdom. This field of research emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a political response to successive waves of mill and factory closures that devastating industrial towns and cities, displacing millions. A way of life seemed to be passing out of existence. Why was this happening? What did it mean? Could it be stopped? This essay …
Beyond Aesthetics: Visibility and Invisibility in the Aftermath of Deindustrialization
This special issue on “Crumbling Cultures,” the first to appear on deindustrialization in a labor history journal, confirms the historiographical trend away from displaced industrial workers themselves and the cultural meaning of job loss, to a wider reflection on the cultural consequences and representations of deindustrialization. The subject, here, is the cultural agency or resilience of working-class communities broadly defined. This shifting…
Native Wage Labour and Independent Production during the 'Era of Irrelevance
THE DEBATE over the inherent right of native self-government has been largely confined the concept of political autonomy. As University of Lethbridge sociologist Menno Boldt reminds us in Surviving as Indians, meaningful political autonomy can only be realized once the economic dependence of native peoples on welfare has been addressed. The historical origins of this dependency have remained obscure because the study of Amerindian history is a re…
(De-)Industrial Heritage
The radical restructuring of the international division of labor has meant that huge swaths of Europe and North America have experienced painful deindustrialization since the 1960s. In itself, this is nothing new, as capitalist development has always been geographically uneven.1 It is also a global phenomenon, with newly industrialized areas experiencing decline soon after the initial areas.2 What differed in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was the s…
The Emotional Fallout of Deindustrialization in Detroit
Sociologist Beverley Skeggs argues that the shift from redistributive politics to the politics of recognition has placed considerable emphasis on the “individual morally authorizing themselves through their own experience.” Indeed, Skeggs claims that “the wounded attachment is premised on the belief that the experience of pain, hurt and oppression provides greater epistemological authority to speak.” If wounding and pain become the measure of inj…
The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin
Christopher Klemek offers an engaging intellectual and political history of the rise and fall of urban renewal in the Atlantic world. It is hard to disagree with the author's condemnation of the “policy debacle called urban renewal” (p. 2). One need not go far to see the deadening effects of large-scale modernist redevelopment projects. That said, the book's title overstates its transatlantic reach. Berlin, London, and Toronto provide interesting…
Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice
As researchers are increasingly taking their research from the campus to the public arena, what are the ethics of, and expectations for, social impact? Going Public responds to the urgent need to expand current thinking on what it means to co-create, to actively involve the public in research, and to reconceptualize research for public consumption. Drawing on conversations with over thirty practitioners across multiple cultures and disciplines, t…
Deindustrialization in Canada: New Perspectives
The post-1945 decades are frequently remembered as a period of unionized prosperity.The French call these years "les trentes glorieuses," the British call them the "long boom," and American historian Jefferson Cowie has referred to this period as the "Great Exception" in a longer history of capitalism. 1 Our understanding of these years as exceptional is only possible, however, with the knowledge of what comes next.The wrenching economic changes …
A fruitless exercise? The political struggle to compel corporations to justify factory closures in Canada
This paper examines the political history of the failed struggle to require companies to justify their plant closing decisions in Canada’s industrial heartland of Ontario. Demands for the public review of plant closing decisions began, locally, in the auto town of Windsor in the 1950s and 1960s and reached Toronto with the closure of Dunlop Tire in 1970. Another wave of closures struck in 1980, this time reaching deep into rural and small-town On…
Interlocking Lives: Employment Mobility and Family Fixity in Three Gentrifying Neighbourhoods of Montreal
This article explores the relationship between employment mobility, family fixity, and gentrification in the lives of 36 residents in and extended commuters to Montreal's southwest borough. Once described as the birthplace of industry in Canada, the neighbourhoods of Saint-Henri, Little Burgundy and Point Saint-Charles have undergone sweeping changes in recent decades. Inner-city areas are not necessarily where one expects to find mobile workers,…
Au-delà du syndrome de la ‘‘citation payante’’ »: Les archives vivantes et la recherche réciproque en histoire orale1
Les organismes subventionnaires nord-américains et européens se sont engagés à promouvoir une culture de partage des données qualitatives et ce changement de perspective a suscité des controverses dans certaines disciplines, en particulier dans les cas où la propriété intellectuelle et l’identité disciplinaire reposent sur le travail de terrain plutôt que sur une réutilisation ou une analyse secondaire des données récoltées par d’autres chercheur…
Un chantier à réinvestir ou à réinventer: Histoire contemporaine du Québec et sources orales
Un chantier à réinvestir ou à réinventer... Histoire contemporaine du Québec et sources orales. Un article de la revue Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française (Volume 69, numéro 1-2, été–automne 2015, p. 7-224) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
The racial politics of criminal jurisdiction in the aftermath of the Anglo-American ‘destroyers-for-bases’ deal, 1940–50
Native Wage Labour and Independent Production during the 'Era of Irrelevance
THE DEBATE over the inherent right of native self-government has been largely confined the concept of political autonomy. As University of Lethbridge sociologist Menno Boldt reminds us in Surviving as Indians, meaningful political autonomy can only be realized once the economic dependence of native peoples on welfare has been addressed. The historical origins of this dependency have remained obscure because the study of Amerindian history is a re…
The Making of the "Rust Belt" in the Minds of North Americans, 1969-1984
Roger & Me, Michael Moore's irreverent 1989 film documentary about cor- porate greed and the hollowness of the American Dream, propelled Flint, Michigan into the North American limelight. The fall of Moore's home town was a decidedly sharp one. To the upbeat music of the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice," Moore showed his audience what Flint had become— a town of abandoned homes, vacant lots, boarded businesses, and empty streets. Interspersed be…
Deindustrializing Youngstown: Memories of Resistance and Loss following 'Black Monday', 1977-1997
The effects of industrial decline are nowhere more apparent than in the once bustling steel town of Youngstown, Ohio. Home to four integrated mills that closed between 1977 and 1985, the city has won the dubious distinction of becoming the Rust Belt city par excellence. How then have area residents come to terms with deindustrialization? Do their memories of the steel mill closings correspond to the Youngstown story being told by popular artists …
Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt, 1969-1984
A comparative regional analysis of the economic and cultural devastation caused by plant shutdowns in the Great Lakes Region, and an insightful examination of how mill and factory workers on both sides of the border made sense of their own displacement
Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism
Not all workers' needs were served by the union. Focusing on the steel works at Duquesne, Pennsylvania, a linchpin of the old Carnegie Steel Company empire and then of U.S. Steel, James D. Rose demonstrates the pivotal role played by a nonunion form of employee representation usually dismissed as a flimsy front for management interests. The early New Deal set in motion two versions of workplace representation that battled for supremacy: company-s…
The racial politics of criminal jurisdiction in the aftermath of the Anglo-American ‘destroyers-for-bases’ deal, 1940–50
Industrial Labor in the Colonial World: Workers of the Chemin de fer Dakar-Niger, 1881-1963
‘When I was your age’: Bearing Witness in Holocaust Education in Montreal
If Holocaust survivor testimony has been the subject of enormous public attention, the educational activism of these survivors has been largely overlooked. Recorded interviews, like public testimonies, have tended to focus on their wartime experiences and specifically the violence they endured. Consequently, little time has been spent exploring their postwar lives and the central role that many have played in Holocaust education. Taking survivors…
Telling Our Stories/Animating Our Past: A Status Report on Oral History and Digital Media
Tens of thousands of oral history interviews sitting in archival drawers, on computer hard drives, or on library bookshelves have never been listened to. Thousands of new interviews are being added each year by the many large testimony projects now underway, including Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Historica–Dominion Institute’s Memory Project. Although the existence of these immense collections is widely known, the intervie…
The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin
Christopher Klemek offers an engaging intellectual and political history of the rise and fall of urban renewal in the Atlantic world. It is hard to disagree with the author's condemnation of the “policy debacle called urban renewal” (p. 2). One need not go far to see the deadening effects of large-scale modernist redevelopment projects. That said, the book's title overstates its transatlantic reach. Berlin, London, and Toronto provide interesting…
The Wounds of Class”: A Historiographical Reflection on the Study of Deindustrialization, 1973–2013
This article examines 40 years of multi‐disciplinary scholarship on deindustrialization in North America and the United Kingdom. This field of research emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a political response to successive waves of mill and factory closures that devastating industrial towns and cities, displacing millions. A way of life seemed to be passing out of existence. Why was this happening? What did it mean? Could it be stopped? This essay …
Beyond Aesthetics: Visibility and Invisibility in the Aftermath of Deindustrialization
This special issue on “Crumbling Cultures,” the first to appear on deindustrialization in a labor history journal, confirms the historiographical trend away from displaced industrial workers themselves and the cultural meaning of job loss, to a wider reflection on the cultural consequences and representations of deindustrialization. The subject, here, is the cultural agency or resilience of working-class communities broadly defined. This shifting…
Remembering Mass Violence: Oral History, New Media and Performance
Remembering Mass Violence breaks new ground in oral history, new media, and performance studies by exploring what is at stake when we attempt to represent war, genocide, and other violations of human rights in a variety of creative works.
Memory of a Bygone Era: Oral History in Quebec, 1979–1986
This research note analyzes a Quebec-based oral history contest, “Memory of a Bygone Era,” which collected nearly a thousand recordings in the 1980s. By returning to this impressive initiative, the co-authors aim to shed light not only on the particular understanding of the emergence of oral history in Quebec, but also on the social context that gave meaning and relevance to what was being “heard.” After describing the creation and operation of t…
Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns . By Abbie Reese
" Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns. By Abbie Reese.." The Oral History Review, 42(2), pp. 386–387
Un chantier à réinvestir ou à réinventer: Histoire contemporaine du Québec et sources orales
Un chantier à réinvestir ou à réinventer... Histoire contemporaine du Québec et sources orales. Un article de la revue Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française (Volume 69, numéro 1-2, été–automne 2015, p. 7-224) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Francis Peddie, Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable: Chilean Exiles in Ontario and Quebec, 1973–2010
"Francis Peddie, Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable: Chilean Exiles in Ontario and Quebec, 1973–2010." American Review of Canadian Studies, 46(1), pp. 126–127
Au-delà du syndrome de la ‘‘citation payante’’ »: Les archives vivantes et la recherche réciproque en histoire orale1
Les organismes subventionnaires nord-américains et européens se sont engagés à promouvoir une culture de partage des données qualitatives et ce changement de perspective a suscité des controverses dans certaines disciplines, en particulier dans les cas où la propriété intellectuelle et l’identité disciplinaire reposent sur le travail de terrain plutôt que sur une réutilisation ou une analyse secondaire des données récoltées par d’autres chercheur…
Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice
As researchers are increasingly taking their research from the campus to the public arena, what are the ethics of, and expectations for, social impact? Going Public responds to the urgent need to expand current thinking on what it means to co-create, to actively involve the public in research, and to reconceptualize research for public consumption. Drawing on conversations with over thirty practitioners across multiple cultures and disciplines, t…
The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place
Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place
(De-)Industrial Heritage
The radical restructuring of the international division of labor has meant that huge swaths of Europe and North America have experienced painful deindustrialization since the 1960s. In itself, this is nothing new, as capitalist development has always been geographically uneven.1 It is also a global phenomenon, with newly industrialized areas experiencing decline soon after the initial areas.2 What differed in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was the s…
The Emotional Fallout of Deindustrialization in Detroit
Sociologist Beverley Skeggs argues that the shift from redistributive politics to the politics of recognition has placed considerable emphasis on the “individual morally authorizing themselves through their own experience.” Indeed, Skeggs claims that “the wounded attachment is premised on the belief that the experience of pain, hurt and oppression provides greater epistemological authority to speak.” If wounding and pain become the measure of inj…
Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place
Introductionlived and Remembered: Social Change through the Prism of Activist Life
INTRODUCTION Lived and Remembered: Social Change through the Prism of Activist Life LANA DEE POVITZ AND STEVEN HIGH∗ ONE OF THE TRUISMS of social movement history is that change never just happens. It has to be diligently, painstakingly fought for, with each victory lifted up and each defeat honestly faced for future wisdom. As historians of social movements, we are always edging as close as we can to the warm-blooded specifics of how change gets…
Political science (30 works) · History (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Politics (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Deindustrialization (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · History (11 works)