Who We Are Is Where We Are - by Amanda McMillan Lequieu (Hardcover)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

The book earns a place among the top ethnographies of working-class loss and decline, helping to illustrate the current struggles and future trajectories for those whose ties to home cannot be easily severed.-- "Social Forces"

This is a real contribution to the literature, although as qualitative research often does, it raises many questions for further research. Overall the book is well written with copious documentation...Recommended.-- "Choice"

Heart is where the home is. ---In this wise and warm book, Amanda McMillan Lequieu gives voice to the inalienable hold of home in a commodified world.--Michael M. Bell, author of An Invitation to Environmental Sociology

Fitting beautifully into the rural sociological tradition of place-based ethnographies, Who We Are Is Where We Are masterfully illustrates the complexities of maintaining community in the wake of structural change. A must-read for anyone interested in how places become "home," and why people persist in them despite loss and decline.--Jennifer Sherman, author of Dividing Paradise and Those Who Work, Those Who Don't

Home is an idea surrounded by an atmosphere of sentiment. McMillan Lequieu not only captures it evocatively with her deeply empathic and rigorous research; she also gives us an incisive analytic vocabulary for diagnosing what is at stake as we make and remake home in a changing world. An essential read.--Rebecca Elliott, author of Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States

Who We Are Is Where We Are offers a novel analysis of how the residues of industry continue to structure peoples' ties to places while constraining communities' capacity to imagine how to reinvent themselves. Through compelling narrative, it poignantly makes the case for the significance of place attachment over and above material conditions in anchoring people in communities.--Colin Jerolmack, author of Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town

About the Author

Amanda McMillan Lequieu is an assistant professor of sociology at Drexel University.