Well it's official, I am returning as lead co-director of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. I last held this position a decade ago, almost to the day. I've got plans!

For those wanting a free eprint of my new article: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/UTWXS...

HONG KONG: Wage protection fund strained as business closures soar while suspected abuse goes unpunished hklabourrights.org/news/hong-ko...

An open letter, to readers, about Charity and Sylvia. I am very pained to feel the need to write this. #queerhistory #pride

The active suppression of Palestinian voices and history is something to see. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

Thanks to @theglobeandmail.com for giving me a little space to talk about a moment in my life. I hope maybe it'll be useful to (possibly give a laugh to?)others with metastatic cancer? share.google/8dRbC0go2heN...

Huge congratulations to Dr. Naomi Frost who successfully defended her brilliant PhD thesis this morning on "Beyond Democratic Kampuchea: Transgenerational Memory and Narrative Re-storying in the Cambodian Post-Genocide Diaspora." A very proud supervisor!

Je suis très heureux d'apprendre que la subvention de traduction du PAES a été accordée. Les Éditions du Boréal publieront la version française de Desindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class.

Six of the sessions of the "(Un)Just Transitions? Deindustrialization and the Environment" conference are available on youtube for those who could not make it to Montreal or who chose to attend another concurrent session. @deindustrialpol.bsky.social www.youtube.com/@CU4thSpace/...

Very enjoyable after-conference meetings today with two young Chilean deindustrialization researchers Marcelo Becerra-Parra and María Paz Cid-Alarcón. They are doing really great work!

One of my pet peeves is how the media regularly calls labour leaders "bosses." This even happens when labour unions are criticizing the obscene bonuses for corporate "executives". www.sudbury.com/around-the-n...

Our week long deindustrialization summer institute and conference just wrapped up - this one focused on the environment. Another great one!

Such a nice photograph of some of my past and present grad students and postdocs at our @deindustrialpol.bsky.social conference here in Montreal. Learned a lot from this gang!

The first day of the 2026 Summer Institute of the Deindustrialization and the Politics of our Time project could not have gone better. Looking forward to day two, starting with:

Congrats to Tom MacMillan whose “‘We Can Do It Ourselves’: Worker-Led Organizing and the Feminist Movement on the West Coast” is recipient of an honorable mention for the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize for Outstanding Dissertation from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.

Very much looking forward to the next 6 days of conversations with deindustrialization scholars from around the world about Unjust Transitions. It begins with a summer institute for emerging scholars and then the main conference here in Montreal. It is our project's 2nd last conference.

Right after the big (Un)Just Transitions? Deindustrialization and the Environment conference (deindustrialization.org/connection/c...) in Montreal this coming week, there is a one day symposium in Paris. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Reminded today of historian Christopher Lasch's 1995 comment that middle class progressives fail to grasp “the importance of class differences.”

Unions make a difference.

Mon article sur l’univers sonore de la grève des dockers britanniques de 1945 est dans le dernier numéro de @revue-lms.bsky.social ! En revisitant les enquêtes du Mass-Observation, j'examine la place des phénomènes sonores dans les pratiques contestataires. Texte intégral ici : tinyurl.com/2cvtdnfx

My book review: "Ross and Savage limit their analysis to the auto sector even though their objective is to understand the overall union’s changing position in electoral politics. This misalignment leads them to dismiss the importance of other sectors and to down play the Unifor merger itself."

I sat down for a couple beers with @coryhaala.bsky.social, author of WHEN DEMOCRATS WON THE HEARTLAND. Cory has brilliantly documented how, as the Dems moved towards corporate cash in the '80s, maverick politicians throughout the Midwest & Plains states practiced good ol’ fashioned populism—and won.

Stand and Deliver is an exciting dramatisation of the 1981 Lee Jeans factory occupation in Greenock. It tells the story of the Scottish working-class women who succeeded in taking on an American corporate giant in Thatcher’s Britain. See it while you still can!

My new article speaks to how the global trade union movement tried to reconcile diverging regional interests in the 1970 and 1980s as countries industrialized or deindustrialized. One country’s runaway factory was another’s runaway development. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Huge congratulations to Louise Bienvenue who received the best book prize from the Canadian Historical Association for Marie-Claire Daveluy : une femme à la table des historiens (1880-1968)!

Very much enjoying #CHASHC2026 in PEI. Great conversations and old friends. Its the biggest Canadian Historical Assn conference on record. Kudos to this year's organizers!!

Off to the train station and then on to PEI for the Canadian Historical Association (albeit slowly - still the best way to travel). Super excited about my reading materials: Making Mill City: Flour and Fortune in Minneapolis AND Wrecked: The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Sinking of the American Economy

A steep decline in the number history faculty in US universities over the past 15 years, important research from Robert Townsend. www.historians.org/perspectives...

In his new book, historian @coryhaala.bsky.social discusses the populist movement of the 1980's launched by progressives.

New article! ‘“No race hate here”? Irish national identity and racism in the mid twentieth century’ just published online in Irish Historical Studies. Explores Irish attitudes to race and racism, including an ugly spate of racist attacks in Dublin during 1963-64. Open access: doi.org/10.1017/ihs....

An inspiring first day of the "After Industry" conference here in Prague. The ways that the collapse of industry is bound up in the fall of the soviet bloc makes it such a different story in some ways than in Western Europe and North America. There is some great research underway!

Very much looking forward to this week's conference in Prague on "After Industry: Cities and Regions in Transformation." It is the first deindustrialization conference that I am aware of focusing on Eastern and Central Europe. I will learn a lot! www.usd.cas.cz/aktuality/af...

The highpoint of my research day in London was coming across Salvador Allende’s power December 1972 speech to the UN General Assembly. He challenged the international economic order, and the grip of transnational corporations, that subordinated much of humanity, tying it to all to imperialism.

Bravo to Camille Robert who starts her tenure track job in the Département d'histoire de l'Université de Montréal this June! She is going to do amazing things over her career. Just sad that I won't be able to continue to work with her as her postdoc has been cut short.

Aug 1956: Tory PM Anthony Eden upon hearing of the successful efforts of the British colony of Hong Kong to industrialize (mainly textiles) responded “That is all right for Hongkong, but what about Lancashire? This problem will have to be tackled some day.’”

Why would we want to learn from our pasts, or ponder the power of the written and spoken word, or explore the deep questions of humanity? According to the University of Hertfordshire, we wouldn't. They've just cut all of our undergrad Humanities programmes

Spent two great days researching industrial restructuring at the OECD in Paris. Huge thanks to the fantastic Ruud and Maxime for all their help! This material is going to be very useful in my book on "The Runaway Shop: How Corporations Weaponized Geography Against Trade Unions." Now on to London!

Now that's a title!

My most recent blog is on "The Liberation of Québec Runs Through Saint-Jérôme: Tricofil and the Left-Nationalist Dream of Worker Ownership." English: deindustrialization.org/the-liberati... French: deindustrialization.org/the-liberati...

Looking forward to this Paris round-table on Monday.

I want to thank Concordia for nominating me for the Trudeau Fellowship. It is an honor to be selected, though my students are going to bug me relentlessly (as they should). My Trudeau funded project is on René Lévesque and Quebec's Industrial Crisis.😅 www.trudeaufoundation.ca/discover-the...

Great project!

Very happy to be able to participate in this round-table organized by Alessandro Ponsi in Paris next week.

Book manuscript submitted for peer review! Since 2016, there have been many assumptions about the relationship between right-wing populism and the economically “left-behind” in deindustrialized areas. What has been missing, however, is sustained historical analysis.

We've published a new piece in 'Global Environment', in which Valerio Caruso interviews Steven High on 'Environmental History and Deindustrialisation Studies'; #openaccess here: doi.org/10.3828/whpg.... #envhist #deindustrialisation

Thanks to Valerio Caruso for inviting me to speak and publishing it and the interview that followed on "Environmental History and Deindustrialisation Studies" in the journal Global Environment (open access) www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/...

Congratulations to Dr. Karin Savard who defended her highly original PhD thesis this morning on « Les Images du travail et le travail des image a fil du temps : Tissage autour des archives des usines textiles Chardonnet et Rhodiacéta de Besançon. » at UQAM. Enjoyed serving as external examiner!

Fantastic round-table today showcasing the research of the 3 postdoctoral fellows currently based at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. Camille Robert, Martín Giraldo-Hoyos, and Florence Darveau Routhier do fantastic work!