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Community, Health, and Family

Speaking of Infrastructures: Industrial Transportation Infrastructure Decline as Symbol of Changing Place Meanings in the American Rust Belt Amanda McMillan Lequieu*, 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 in two post-industrial communities, I find that speakers repeatedly discussed trains and ships when prompted to make sense of present-day economic hardship. I show how, unexpectedly, 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. I bring together narrative and infrastructure studies with structural and cultural strands of deindustrialization research to argue 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.  Across rural and urban contexts, residents offered interpretations of the loss of rails, roads, or shipping routes to shed light on their experiences of the ongoing disconnections of post-industrial life. Industrial transportation infrastructures emerged as a category of analysis applied by interviewees themselves—a representation not only of familiar and acute processes of boom and bust, but also of the chronic structural and conceptual marginalization brought about by deindustrialization. In both complete removal and partial functionality, industrial transportation infrastructures show how lived experiences of economic thriving are often contingent upon, entangled in, or reacting to the politics, places, and material limits that comprise working-class life. Thus, even in their absence—perhaps because of their absence—infrastructures are important material and cultural windows into the place-making processes of residents in deindustrialized regions.