About the speakers:

Joe Rollin is one of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaigns founding members. Joe is also a full time Trade Union Organiser and lives in Barnsley, South Yorkshire.

Kate Flannery is Secretary of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC), ex Women Against Pit Closures and one of the founders of the Friends of Edward Carpenter. She has also been an activist in socialist feminist, anti-racist and LGBTQ+ political and community organisations and campaigns.

Natalie Thomlinson is Associate Professor of Modern British Cultural History at the University of Reading. She is a historian of feminism and gender in modern Britain, and her first monograph, Race and ethnicity in the women’s movement in England, 1968–93, explored debates around race in ‘second-wave’ feminism. She has been co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘‘Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984–5: Charting changing gender roles in working-class communities in post-war Britain’; the monograph from this is due to be published by Oxford University Press in 2023.

Jay Emery is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Lincoln. Following doctoral research on belonging and affective memory in the former Nottinghamshire coalfield, Jay’s current research focuses on senses of alienation in deindustrialising towns.

Nicky Stubbs is a PhD candidate at the University of Bath. He teaches politics and social research at the University of Sheffield, and researches at Leeds University Business School. He grew up in Grimethorpe, a former colliery community at the edge of Barnsley, in the 1990s. His research focuses on the transformation of class politics and the long-term socio-political consequences of deindustrialisation, economic reconstruction and social reconfiguration. He has experience as a researcher for the National Union of Mineworkers, has worked in regional government and currently sits on Coalfields Regeneration Trust board of trustees.

Richard Gater is a Post-doctoral research fellow at the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data. He returned to education at age 33 after doing various jobs, including construction, manufacturing and retail. His return to education included a Sociology with Criminology undergraduate degree at the University of South Wales; MSc in Social Science Research Methods at Cardiff University; and an ESRC-funded PhD that explored the school-to-work transition and masculine identity of a group of marginalised young men from the South Wales valleys.

Kat Simpson is Senior Lecturer in Education and Community Studies at the University of Huddersfield. Her research interests lie in education, deindustrialisation, and social haunting, especially the ways in which processes, relations, and experiences of schooling are shaped by industrial matters of the past. Her first monograph Social Haunting, Education and the Working Class: Reimagining Schooling in a Former Mining Community was published by Routledge in 2021.