Den stora gruvstrejken i Malmfälten : En muntlig historia

Sammanfattning: This dissertation explores how the miners’ strike in the Norrbotten ore fields 1969–70 has been made meaningful. For a long time, this strike has been a centre of debates and reflections on society, culture, and history in Sweden. The popular support for the miners’ strike was high, and a solidarity movement comprising loosely organised individual and collective initiatives was formed. Journalists, documentary film-makers, playwrights, scholars, and others within this movement documented the strike. Following the strike, actors within the solidarity movement expressed concerns that the experiences from the strike would be scattered and forgotten. Therefore, the strike has been depicted many times and in many genres. The authors of these depictions have commonly used the participants’ voices to narrate the strike.Through the miners’ strike, consecutive depictions of it, and memories from its participants, this dissertation studies the relationships between memories from individual actors, shared memory processes on a societal level, and history-writing. The central concept is meaning-making, which in this dissertation stands for people’s ever ongoing work to make themselves, others, and shared situations comprehensible. Meaning-making is studied through the more empirically oriented concepts memory and narrative. A combination of what historian Alistair Thomson has called ‘a popular memory approach to oral history’ and Gérard Genette’s narratology is put to use in the studies. The focus is thus how the participants in the strike and actors in the solidarity movement have made stories out of their memories, and how they then relate to existing accounts. This leads to a discussion on how voices from actors can be used in order to produce knowledge and/or change.On an empirical level, the dissertation contributes with knowledge on how the strike has been made meaningful through time, but also about the strike as an event in the past. The most important material is a new collection of oral history interviews with participants in the strike and people who took part in the solidarity movement, but the dissertation also studies books, articles and dramas that depicts the strike. In the first empirical chapter, constructions and discussions of the miners’ voices in texts by actors within the solidarity movement during the period 1968–2009 is discussed. The second empirical chapter explores how two persons that reported from the strike describes and discusses their journeys to the strike as well as their texts about the strike. The third empirical chapter analyses the different stories about the strike that the collection of oral history interviews contains, and shows how the strike has been made into an event. The fourth empirical chapter shows how participants relate to existing stories about the strike when the mediate their memories of it in the oral history interviews.