Book
In a rusted place: iron, steel, and the (re)creation of home in the American rustbelt
University of Wisconsin--Madison
2019
Abstract
When a stable community is created, both structurally and culturally, by a capitalist company as a site of labor for a particular industry, what happens to the social life of that place when the mobility of capital to that place ceases? Bringing historical political economy into conversation with theories of place identity formation, I interrogate: a) what historical actors and processes constructed the structures and cultures of industrial places in the late 19th and 20th centuries, b) how residents in iron and steel communities understand the rise and fall of their economic raison d'e̲tre, and c) how and why the past shapes long-term residents' conceptions of the future of their places. Drawing from archival, ethnographic, and interview data collected across two urban and rural communities of a former Midwestern steel commodity chain, I argue that the processes of capitalism not only take place, they make place. I contend that the political ecologies and economies established during the American industrial revolution continue to structure the landscapes and lived experiences of long-term residents in Chicago's urban steel neighborhood and Wisconsin's rural iron mining belt. This project offers three contributions to environmental and economic sociology. First, this dissertation intervenes in the familiar tale of deindustrialization by interrogating the place of place in the globalization story. My data demonstrate how the historical commodification of nature by industrial firms shapes infrastructures and narratives of identity today. Second, I offer a clearer theorization of the stability of place in the face of mobility by exposing how and why people stay at home in environmentally fragile and economically precarious landscapes. Finally, integrating analysis of historical and contemporary data from communities at opposite ends of a commodity chain offers insight into the source of the stories that still shape entire regions' expectations for the future.
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Details
- Title
- In a rusted place
- Creators
- Amanda McMillan Lequieu
- Publisher
- University of Wisconsin--Madison; Madison, Wis.
- Number of pages
- 1 online resource (viii, 215 pages)
- Resource Type
- Book
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Sociology
- Identifiers
- 991019186793604721