Amanda McMillan Lequieu

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.

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.