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BEES Seminar: Who We Are is Where We Are

Thursday, January 23, 2025

3:30 PM-5:00 PM

Amanda Lequieu, an assistant professor in Drexel's Department of Sociology, will present "Who we are is where we are: Navigating the intersections of environment, place attachment, and economy in the American Rust Belt."

 

Abstract: Half a century ago, the mass closures of manufacturing and mining gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. In the decades that followed, public writers and academic researchers alike have suggested that without the smoke of the mills, the creak of mine shaft elevators, and the perpetual wages of industrial work, de-industrialized places have simply lost their grip on their people and their place in the American story. And yet tens of thousands of people did not leave deindustrialized communities. 

 

In this talk—and her new book published by Columbia University Press—Dr. Amanda LeQuieu considers the renegotiation of home, survival, and meaning in two long-deindustrialized Midwestern communities.

Through ethnography, archival research, and 120 interviews with people who lived through industrial boom and bust, LeQuieu asks questions about place, residential stability, and the materiality of staying in an economically bereft landscape. Why—and how—do people remain in declining areas through difficult circumstances? What do their choices tell us about rootedness in a time of flux? And how do their places constrain or enable certain choices?

In answering these questions, she builds a theory of home in crisis—how and where it is made, threatened, and renegotiated in a world characterized more by transformation than stability.

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Location

PISB 106- new room

Audience

  • Everyone