Lecturer in Global Inequalities , School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Glasgow
Biography
Ewan Gibbs lectures in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. He is a scholar of work and labour with a focus on historical political economy and energy sectors. From 2022-2024, Ewan will be completing a BA-Wolfson fellowship, ‘Decarbonising the Economy and Society: Policy, Labour and Community in Energy Transitions’. This study will investigate the UK’s long movement out of coal and workplace and community experiences of new energy infrastructures in oil and gas, nuclear and renewables since the mid-twentieth century. Ewan has developed expertise in combining oral histories with archival research. His doctoral research on deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields combined an extensive oral history project with former miners and their family members alongside consulting the records of trade unions, the nationalised coal industry and government. Since then, he has worked as the PI on a Carnegie Trust funded project about Scottish nationalism and fuel economies, combining testimonies from politicians, anti-nuclear. activists and government officials with records from the SNP and Green parties as well as published pamphlets and magazines. His current research expands that towards a UK-wide focus, considering distinct territorial experiences of energy transitions by case studying experiences of infrastructure closure and development using a similar range of sources.
Selected publications
Ewan Gibbs, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland (University of London Press, 2021)
Ewan Gibbs, ‘Scotland’s Faltering Green Industrial Revolution’, Political Quarterly 92 (2021) pp. 57-65
Ewan Gibbs and Ewan Kerr, ‘Mobilizing Solidarity in Factory Occupations: Activist Responses to Multinational Plant Closures’, Economic and Industrial Democracy (2020) DOI:10.1177/0143831X20931928
Ewan Gibbs, ‘The Moral Economy of the Scottish Coalfields: Managing Deindustrialization under Nationalization c.1947–1983’, Enterprise and Society 19 (1) (2018) 124-152
Shelley Condratto and Ewan Gibbs, ‘After Industrial Citizenship: Adapting to Precarious Employment in the Lanarkshire Coalfield, Scotland and Sudbury Hardrock Mining, Canada’, Labour/Le Travail vol.81 (2018) 213-239
