Mining-nostalgias: youth speculative fictions about place and the future

This paper examines how young people in a deindustrialised mining town in South Wales, UK engage with history, place, and futurity through writing speculative fiction. As part of a research-creation project, students aged 14–15 composed dystopian stories set in imagined futures of their local geography and later performed their work in a public showcase. As barometers of lived atmospheres, the students’ speculative fictions register how local histories of extraction can shape their sense of place, while also articulating refusals of dominant narratives of decline. The paper develops the concept of mining-nostalgias to describe the affective and material residues that young people inherit and rework through creative practice. By positioning speculative fiction as a method for attuning to social atmospheres and affective inheritances, the paper contributes to youth geographies by showing how young people negotiate the historical hauntings of place while imagining alternative futures.