Who We Are Is Where We Are

Making Home in the American Rust Belt

Amanda McMillan Lequieu

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English

Columbia University Press
29 May 2024

Industrialisation & industrial history; Sociology & anthropology

Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people remain in declining areas through difficult circumstances? What do their choices tell us about rootedness in a time of flux?

Through the cases of the former steel manufacturing hub of southeast Chicago and a shuttered mining community in Iron County, Wisconsin, Amanda McMillan Lequieu traces the power and shifting meanings of the notion of home for people who live in troubled places. Building from on-the-ground observations of community life, archival research, and interviews with long-term residents, she shows how inhabitants of deindustrialized communities balance material constraints with deeply felt identities. McMillan Lequieu maps how the concept of home has been constructed and the ways it has been reshaped as these communities have changed. She considers how long-term residents navigate the tensions around belonging and making ends meet long after the departure of their community's founding industry.

Who We Are Is Where We Are links the past and the present, rural and urban, to shed new light on life in postindustrial communities. Beyond a story of Midwestern deindustrialization, this timely book provides broader insight into the capacious idea of home-how and where it is made, threatened, and renegotiated in a world fraught with change.

By: Amanda McMillan Lequieu
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780231198752
ISBN 10: 0231198752
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 29 May 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Amanda McMillan Lequieu is an assistant professor of sociology at Drexel University.

Reviews for Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt

Who We Are Is Where We Are offers a novel analysis of how the residues of industry continue to structure peoples' ties to places while constraining communities’ capacity to imagine how to reinvent themselves. Through compelling narrative, it poignantly makes the case for the significance of place attachment over and above material conditions in anchoring people in communities. -- Colin Jerolmack, author of Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town Fitting beautifully into the rural sociological tradition of place-based ethnographies, Who We Are is Where We Are masterfully illustrates the complexities of maintaining community in the wake of structural change. A must-read for anyone interested in how places become “home,” and why people persist in them despite loss and decline. -- Jennifer Sherman, author of Dividing Paradise and Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t