In her recently published book, Who We Are Is Where We Are (Columbia University Press, 2024), Amanda McMillan Lequieu MS’13, PhD’19 takes readers on a journey through two communities hit by deindustrialization. On the way, she uncovers why people continue to live where factories have closed and residents struggle to find jobs or put food on the table, and she examines the connection between stability and community. Underlying the entire narrative is one simple question: What is home?

The first place McMillan Lequieu called home was a former coal mining village of about 700 people in Pennsylvania. The area had both a rural legacy given its location in the Appalachian Mountains as well as the boom-to-bust story of the nearby steel town of Pittsburgh.

After earning her undergraduate degree and working with an environmental nonprofit in Europe for a couple of years, McMillan Lequieu began to look for the next place to call home. She applied to several graduate programs and found the best fit at CALS, where she earned a master’s degree in rural sociology (now community and environmental sociology). Following that, she continued on with her Ph.D., a joint program between CALS grow and UW’s sociology department.

“I feel very fortunate that I found these programs,” McMillan Lequieu says. “I was able to start asking questions about how space and economy intersect with people’s stories and sense of who they are.”

During her time in graduate school, McMillan Lequieu returned again and again to questions of why people stay in or go back to areas hit by hardship — war-torn areas in Uganda, the resource-limited village of her childhood, or German-heritage farms in rural Wisconsin.

“Amanda was always thinking about communities,” says Jane Collins, professor emeritus of community and environmental sociology. “She was concerned with how communities cohere and persist in the face of economic, ecological, or social change, and that motivated her doctoral work and her book.”

While earning her Ph.D., McMillan Lequieu completed research on a former steel mill on the south side of Chicago and a shuttered mining town in Iron County, Wisconsin. She studied local histories and conducted more than 100 interviews with residents. Afterward, she revisited the data — and each word of her dissertation — to develop a book. She did follow-up interviews, many via phone or Zoom, as the COVID pandemic made in-person visits impossible. After her analysis, McMillan Lequieu realized that their stories repeatedly focused on why and how they stayed in these areas in the 50 years since the mines and mill closed. Residents were expected to abandon these communities, but they didn’t because the communities still felt like home.

“I wanted to get at the nuance in the stories of these residents,” explains McMillan Lequieu. “I wanted to look through their narratives and think about what was holding them in place, for better or for worse.”

In the social sciences, home is often defined in terms of an individual’s sense of attachment to a place, or it’s tied to the economic possibilities of the area. In many cases, it is assumed that stability is necessary for people to call somewhere home. But McMillan Lequieu wasn’t satisfied with these definitions. In her conversations with long-term residents of Southeast Chicago and Iron County, it became clear that stability in the usual sense — a steady-state economy or neighborhood context — was not required. Instead, connection to a community was influenced by three factors: geography, economy, and social relationships.

Geography played a role in many residents’ stories about why they stayed in their homes. Many interviewees explained that they truly liked where they lived. The former industrial landscapes — old mine headframes or steel mill rubble — created a collective sense of identity among residents. Those same landscapes shaped local zoning or economic development policies.

Regional economic struggles impacted individual experiences of job loss and making ends meet, and they also limited community redevelopment for decades. When a county or neighborhood is consistently in economic depression, new businesses are often deterred, and people and policymakers from outside the community are less likely to reinvest in the local area.

Finally, social relationships bind people to a location. Residents explained that moving away from home didn’t make sense to them when they were so reliant on their neighbors, familiar teachers, or religious congregations. Nearby friends and family might watch a child, if needed, or could pitch in to solve a problem. Residents knew that if they moved away, they would lose this much- needed support.

“The stories in my book capture this complex and nuanced idea of ‘home’ through these three elements,” says McMillan Lequieu. “It traces how long-term residents in these two communities redefined what home meant to them — both practically and culturally — across five decades of postindustrial struggle and success.”

McMillan Lequieu, who now finds her academic home at Drexel University as an assistant professor of sociology, continues to study how communities are impacted by social and economic change. She recently received the Rural Sociological Society Early Career Award, which will support her next research project on how urban efforts to address climate change through modifications in energy infrastructure impact rural communities.

“We tend to think of ourselves as unbound from place in the U.S. in the 21st century,” says Collins. “But that is not the reality for millions of Americans. Amanda’s work investigates the continuing significance of place for these communities. And with so many challenges facing us, we need to understand how communities adapt and survive.”

This article was posted in Fall 2024, Offshoots and tagged Amanda McMillan Lequieu, Appalachia, Chicago, Community and Environmental Sociology, deindustrialization, economic struggles, Iron County, Jane Collins, Rural sociology, Rust Belt.