The role of community events in preserving identity in the context of social change: An ethnographic analysis of the World Coal Carrying Championships

Abstract

This article examines the role community events can play in negotiating forms of community and place identity against a backdrop of social, economic and urban change. Our contention is that in the context of globalisation and de-industrialisation, forms of working-class community may be expressed and recreated through maintaining traditions and practices established in place-based community events. The article is based on an ethnographic study of the World Coal Carrying Championships (WCCC) which involved undertaking in-depth interviews, volunteering, focus groups, observations and archival analysis. The findings show how the WCCC is invested with powerful symbols and invented traditions that are activated through the event. By reconstructing and remobilising shared pasts in the present, the WCCC permits community members to create an affective sense of community in the contemporary context, even in spite of the destabilising loss of other aspects of their industrial lives.