Sarah MacDonell

Sarah Macdonell is a PhD student in Communications at McGill University. Her research explores deindustrialized or abandoned extractive resource frontiers and infrastructures in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She is interested in the affective attachments former coal company towns maintain to industrial pasts. She holds an MA in English Literature from Concordia University and a BA from Pitzer College.

Sarah’s dissertation project explores the poetics and aesthetics of the afterlives of coal extraction in Cape Breton. It asks how often folkloric representations mediate the post-coal economies of Cape Breton that continue to produce the region as a resuscitated “sacrifice zone” and partially form subjects of former extractive economies. This project explores four sites where mid-century coal economies have been succeeded: an internationally acclaimed golf resort in Inverness which buried and then sodded an old mine, a call centre in Sydney which draws workers from former coal communities, a failed heavy water plant project in Glace Bay, and a tourism economy in the Mabou Highlands and Deep Sea Colliery where visitors hike and tour old mine sites. As these sites, coal’s ruination and rubble are not “absolute” or “complete”. Instead, they exert residual influence in mediating the affects, desires and fantasies surrounding future economic opportunity. Coal Folk investigates how abandoned coal and its divergent resource imaginaries narrate the techno-political forms and registers under, first, which depleted coal infrastructures are abandoned, transformed and remembered and, second, how successive industries relate to, reproduce or disavow this history.

Publications 

“Infrastructural Ruin as Placeholder in Giscome, B.C.”, Helioptrope Environmental Journal, September 2025, https://www.heliotropejournal.net/helio/infrastructuralruin .

Activity 

Sarah is an affiliate of Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time and of McGill Energy Centre’s Just Storage Project.