A Drexel University sociologist investigates how deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest – and why some people still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises
“Much of America’s popular discourse about social change surrounds people who, when times get tough, pick up and move to a new location,” said Amanda McMillan Lequieu, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
“As an environmental sociologist of ‘home and work’ I think it’s important for us to pay attention to the people who stay in places, and particularly, those places that are hard to live in.”
In her new book, “Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt,” McMillan Lequieu investigates the cases of the former steel manufacturing hub of Southeast Chicago and a shuttered mining community in Iron County, Wisconsin, tracing the power and shifting meanings of the notion of home for people who live in troubled places.
She recently shared some of her research insights with the News Blog.
Why is it important to focus on people who stay?
As sociologists, we want to focus on where people are, and there are always people living in places that are really hard to live. Focusing on how and why those people stay there, despite significant challenges, can help us learn how these communities deal with change and how they make sense of larger scale issues like climate change or deindustrialization. I think, to have an equitable society, we need to consider both people who move and also those who remain place amid fluctuations in economic growth and development.
What drew you to the study of communities that stay put?
I grew up in a rust belt village outside of Pittsburgh. So, my hometown is a village of 700 people used to be a coal mining community in the early 20th century, and then it became a bedroom community for commuters going into Pittsburgh for steel jobs. Once the steel jobs disappeared in Pittsburgh, it still was a commuting community for some time, but it’s really struggled economically ever since the eighties and nineties. I’ve always been really interested in my neighbors who stayed there, and I started to ask a lot of questions because I was seeing this pattern across the United States – and also internationally — of people finding their way through life in challenging environmental and economic contexts.
After conducting 120 interviews and scouring local historical records what did you find?
Across rural and urban communities, industrial pasts shape the present in powerful ways. I looked at a former iron mining community in this book — Iron County, Wisconsin. In 2010, a new iron mine was proposed. Returning to this formerly core industry made sense, and residents were excited by the prospect of over 700 jobs tied to economic development in a community that had been experiencing Great Depression-level poverty rates for over 60 years. But there was also a lot of contestation about this new mine because it was going to be potentially environmentally damaging. When the mine fell through, the community was left to grapple with continued economic depression.
In the second case from the book, I look at the Southeast Side of Chicago, a former steel mill community that had lost tens of thousands of jobs in approximately the same period of time that Iron Country had lost their mining jobs. This urban neighborhood has also had a lot of proposed — and failed — economic development and job-creation attempts over the years. Through this comparison, a fruitful way of thinking about how regional socioeconomic development is linked to home began to emerge for me.
How did the comparison of past to present factor into your work?
Seventy percent of my interviewees were people who had lived through “boom to bust” what that means is these people had personally experienced the height of iron, or steel – and seen the subsequent decline — and yet continued to live in that community.
Nostalgia is such a powerful concept, and this comparison between past and present showed up in almost all my interviewees, regardless of their age or their personal experience, because objectively, the height of iron and steel was economically better. During the industrial boom of the mid-20th century, when blue collar work was paid middle-class wages. With mass industrial closure, the bottom fell out beneath an entire generation.
People were visibly sad about their community’s collective losses, and there is to this day, some grief about the hard times that followed. But folks were also immensely proud of how they figured out how to make ends meet. My book focuses on how these communities came together and worked together to solve problems and envision a future collectively.
What was a major takeaway from this research?
The importance of local policies and politics. Interviewees recognize the importance of local government for funding projects that reflect the communities’ interests – and their biggest frustrations were about local proposals, killed by a city council inaction or underfunding from state, county, or federal budget constraints.
I think industrial communities across the U.S. have gotten a lot of blame for voting in a certain way, or voting for certain reasons. While voting patterns do say a lot, on the ground I found that people were making political decisions based not on national concerns but on what future they wanted for their local community. Their focus was on local economic development rather than political decisions at the federal level — on finding and funding policies and projects that will contribute to an increase in the quality of life in both rural and urban settings for all people, so the younger generation doesn’t feel like they need to move away to find better jobs.
We need local, state and federal governments to pay attention to how these community members are diagnosing problems on the ground. We know that more crises lie ahead —challenges like climate change, regional economic declines, or pandemic can undermine a community’s wellbeing so quickly. So as a society, we need to work toward integrating a variety of community voices into the policy making process so that people can revive and renew their own communities in ways that are locally appropriate.
Reporters interested in speaking with McMillian Lequieu should contact Emily Storz, associate director of News & Media Relations, els332@drexel.edu or 215.895.2705.
