Amanda McMillan Lequieu

Residents of two Midwestern, post-industrial communities use absent objects, and specifically industrial transportation infrastructures, in their narratives of place and meaning. Drawing from 35 interviews, as well as archival documents and ethnographic research, I find that speakers repeatedly discussed trains and ships when prompted to make sense of present-day economic hardship. Industrial transportation infrastructures emerged as a category of analysis applied by interviewees themselves-a representation of both acute experiences and of the chronic structural and cultural marginalization brought about by deindustrialization. Bringing narrative and infrastructure studies into conversation with structural and cultural strands of deindustrialization research, I suggest that study participants leverage declined infrastructural systems as narrative props-objects used to tell a meaningful story-to articulate how legacies of structural disinvestment impact their communities. This article shows how lived experiences and contemporary interpretations of large-scale political economic processes can be mediated through the material residues of infrastructural decline.

This article asks how the term sacrifice zones has reflected and enabled changing concerns of environmentalism from 1970 to today. Through the historical genealogy of a concept deployed in academia, popular media, and activism, we trace how, when, and in what contexts the concept sacrifice zone has been used. Tracing four discursive turns, each focused on an alternative interpretation of the disposability of certain people and their environments, this project offers a generative window into the interplay between keywords of environmental justice and on-the-ground meaning making. First used in a US government report rationalizing the expendability of territories for large-scale natural resource extraction in response to the energy crisis, the term was quickly adopted by activists, policymakers, and residents to problematize the socioeconomic and political logics driving the uneven siting of nuclear waste near Native American reservations and the inequitable depositing of pollutants in fence-line communities. More recently, the term has been expanded to include labor exploitation and climate change, leading us to conceptualize supra sacrifice zones-spaces in which intersectional categories of sacrifice are layered and compounded in one location or community over time. By studying how this core environmental justice concept travels and is embedded in our globalized social structures, this article shows how keywords shape social life.

Researchers are predicting that the spatially uneven distribution of climate change risks will further exacerbate the inequalities of environmental change in the coming decades. This case study of coffee offers a window into the feedback loops of ecological health, agricultural economies, and social well-being on a quickly warming planet. Drawing from a review of research across disciplines, we explore three human-driven factors that have increased the risks of loss for coffee producers in the face of climate change. These three characteristics of the coffee commodity chain-geographical consolidation, genetic variation, and market factors-enmesh social, ecological, and economic expectations of coffee as a high-value agricultural product. Considering the impact of climate change on coffee production sheds light on how climate change interacts with preexisting ecological, social, and economic challenges of global, agricultural production.

This paper compares two cases of contested mining proposals in the Upper Midwest region of the U.S. to examine how mining companies attempt to respond to opposition and secure regulatory approval . Combining analysis of company documents, regulatory reports, media coverage, and interviews about proposed copper-nickel mining in Minnesota and iron mining in Wisconsin, this paper assesses the discursive framing used by company elites as they seek to mitigate public concerns about environmental risks. We demonstrate how companies use environmental regulations and the scientific information needed for regulatory compliance to circumnavigate environmental conflicts. Specifically, we show how companies characterize their role within the institutional contexts of site fights as that of good corporate citizens, embracing the rigor of the regulatory processes, proposing new technologies to manage environmental risks, and managing the dissemination of scientific knowledge with stakeholders. Rather than taking the bottom-up perspective common to research on site fights, we advance research on elite framing, corporate social responsibility, and expertise by highlighting how companies embrace regulations and perform transparent expertise in attempts to assert legitimacy in contested mining contexts. This paper offers a critical analysis of how elites of capitalism use regulations and voluntary information disclosure, two factors often viewed as antithetical to natural resource development, to attempt to circumnavigate on-the-ground contestation of new projects. 

•Home is a combination of material resources, social construction, and embodied experiences.•By considering home in resource-extractive contexts, we gain insight into patterns of response to economic change.•Stability of home relies on non-economic narratives, since resource extraction was notoriously unstable.•Support for new mining motivated by residents’ desire for renewed sense of ‘home,’ beyond hopes for direct employment.