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.

It was midday on a Saturday, and Simonetta led me from the open front door of her home in southeast Chicago to her sitting room and settled next to her husband, Christopher, on the couch.
In the 1980s, Christopher had worked a few blocks away at U.S. Steel South Works, earning three times the minimum wage with a high school diploma – more than enough to buy a house near Simonetta’s parents before their first baby arrived. Like their neighbors in southeast Chicago, Simonetta and Christopher’s expectations for work and home were set by the steel industry.
Between 1875 and 1990, the employment offered here by eight steel mills created a dense network of working-class neighborhoods on the marshlands 15 miles south of downtown Chicago. For the tens of thousands of employees who lived and worked in this region, steel was a rare breed of work: unionized, blue-collar jobs that paid middle-class wages, with starting salaries in the 1960s at nearly three times the minimum wage.

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.

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.