Fred Burrill

I am a settler historian of working-class formation and disintegration, focusing on deindustrialization, settler colonialism, and white supremacy in Quebec and the Maritimes. I completed my PhD at Concordia University in 2021, where I am a Core Affiliate of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. I am also an affiliate of the Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time research partnership, a SSHRC-funded transnational initiative bringing together academic researchers, labour unions, museums, and archives across Canada, the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, and Germany to look at the causes and consequences of plant closures and working-class relegation in these countries.

My doctoral dissertation looks at the working-class neighbourhood of Saint-Henri, once the beating heart of industrial production in Canada and now the centre of the maelstrom of speculative real-estate investment in Montreal. Based primarily on local community archives and oral history interviews with long-time inhabitants of the neighbourhood, it engages with the burgeoning field of deindustrialization studies to argue that contemporary forms of resistance to the gentrification process continue to be impacted by the residual social and cultural expressions of an industrial world that came unceremoniously to an end in the 1970s and 80s. Shifting economic modes of accumulation and rapidly-changing local geographies have also, however, occasioned a transfer of political focus from labour production to reproductive struggles over access to housing, health, and welfare, bringing with it competing discourses around memory and territory that raise thorny questions about identity and belonging in a context of ongoing settler colonialism and increasing visibility of street-involved Indigenous populations.

My current research pursues the study of Canadian working-class experience, albeit with a focus on my childhood community of Upper Musquodoboit, Nova Scotia. The recent history of the Musquodoboit Valley is a good indicator of the rapid cycles of extraction and abandon that condition rural working-class lives: the region experienced a short-lived gold boom in the 1930s, and in the early years of NAFTA was home to the largest sawmill in Eastern Canada; after the sharp downslide of North American softwood-lumber markets and the closure of the mill, followed by several decades of outmigration to the Alberta tar sands, workers my age now cling to the temporary and environmentally destructive jobs of a recently launched open-pit gold mine.

My work seeks to analyze the broad material and cultural dynamics of the area through the very specific lens of the history of death and dying. Employing oral history interviews and archival research, I am studying three specific micro-histories of death – the Moose River Mine Disaster, the 1936 cave-in that claimed the life of major Ontario shareholder Robert Magill; the annual softball tournaments that for a time commemorated the accidental deaths of two young local men, one of which occurred in 1979 and the other in 2003, examining the impact of neoliberalism on working-class self-organization over the intervening decades; and the largely unpaid, reproductive care work of the Arimathea Funeral Cooperative, a local initiative founded in 1993 that provides at-cost burial services to the community. This research is trying to get at broader patterns of regional political economy, the solidarities and racial and gendered divisions of local working-class culture, environmental history, and the long-term impacts on community of life on the resource frontier.

I am enthusiastic about supervising graduate research in 20th-century Atlantic Canadian and Quebec history, working class and labour history, deindustrialization studies, and oral history.

Publications

Fred Burrill, “Deindustrialization, Gender, and Working-Class Militancy in Saint-Henri, Montreal,” Labour/Le Travail 91, 1 (Spring 2023): 89-114.

Fred Burrill, “On Good Intentions: A Critical Note on Recent Studies of State Planning in Canada,” Acadiensis 49, 1 (Spring 2020): 171-180.

Fred Burrill, “Re-developing Underdevelopment: An Agenda for New Histories of Capitalism in the Maritimes,” Acadiensis 48, 2 (Fall 2019): 179-189.

Fred Burrill, “The Settler Order Framework: Rethinking Canadian Working-Class History,” Labour/le Travail 83 (Spring 2019): 173-197.