Pop, the Question (S6: E42)
Rust Belt Stories
Featured Guest Amanda McMillan Lequieu, PhD (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Center for Science, Technology and Society, College of Arts and Sciences, Drexel University)
Host and Producer Melinda Lewis, PhD (Associate Director, Marketing & Media)
Dean Paula Marantz Cohen, PhD (Dean, Pennoni Honors College)
Executive Producer Erica Levi Zelinger (Director, Marketing & Media)
Producer Brian Kantorek (Assistant Director, Marketing & Media)
Research and Script Melinda Lewis, PhD
Audio Engineering and Editing Brian Kantorek
Original Theme Music Brian Kantorek
Production Assistance Noah Levine
Social Media Outreach Jaelynn Vesey
Graphic Design Bhavna Ganesan
Logo Design Michal Anderson
Additional Voiceover Malia Lewis
Recorded May 27, 2022 through virtual conferencing.
Pop, the Question is a production of Marketing & Media in Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University.
The views expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of Drexel University or Pennoni Honors College.
To learn more about Amanda McMillan Lequieu, visit www.amandamcmillanlequieu.com.
Additional historical information on Herminie, PA by Jim Miller. To learn more about this and other Pennsylvania towns, visit www.youtube.com/channel/UCbtpYJoRYw7PdJ3M7IyWvYg.
Copyright © 2022 Drexel University
TRANSCRIPT
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Melinda Lewis:
Welcome to Pop the Question, a podcast that exists at the intersection of pop culture and academia. We
sit down and talk about our favorite stuff through the lenses of what we do and who we are from
Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University, Dr. Melinda Lewis here. I'm your host. I'm here with
Amanda McMillan Lequieu, an environmental sociologist here at Drexel University, and we're going to
be talking about a lot of stuff, but mostly place, people and stories and I'm really excited to get into it.
How are you?
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
I'm doing well. How are you doing?
Melinda Lewis:
Good. I always get very excited, but also nervous talking to sociologists because you all are very trained
to pay attention. Just thinking about the ways that you are writing and listening, were you always
somebody who was asking a lot of questions? Were you somebody who was just overall curious about
the world?
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Working backwards I really did stumble into becoming a sociologist and becoming a professor. I grew up
outside of Pittsburgh in a small town of Herminie, a rural community, a village of 700. Really interesting
rural urban connections. We spent our childhood in this community and it was a really beautiful place to
grow up. Easy access to outdoors, but still the fading days of small town grocery stores and pet shops
and notary stores. It's changed a lot since then, but I still have some dear folks who still live in that area.
Speaker 5:
One of the things to know about Herminie is Cole. Without Cole, there would be no Herminie. In the
1890s, a Philadelphia company got interested in the area out there and bought land and built a mine
that produced the town called Herminie. Now, the mine didn't last forever. In the late thirties, 1938, the
mine shut down. Even though the mine is no longer there, the town still exists.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Something that always struck me and my family who struggled with it growing up, was my parents
moved to this town in 1970s and they are still considered outsiders even decades later. As I moved to
college, traveled, lived abroad, came back, I'd always wrestle with this sense of belonging, this idea of
who belongs where and why. How do we plug into a community? Why does it matter to feel like some
place is home or that we belong somewhere that were accepted socially. Throughout growing up I was
fascinated with environmental issues. This was a former coal mining town that I grew up in. Our creeks
were always orange from iron mine runoff.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Then as I got older and started asking some questions about belonging and social life, I continued to
focus in college and then beyond on reading and work that was looking at the intersection of humans
and environments. That's what brought me into this line of research that's really just talking to people
and asking them their stories and trying to capture them as thoughtfully as possible. Then mapping
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people's experiences and stories onto history and data that's been gathered to make sure that the
stories are making sense within the broader world.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
There are rural sociologists, the people who commit their lives to watching and studying and learning
about how really tightly knit groups of people what does that mean? Whenever we're tightly knit, in
every day pop culture, we're like, "Ah, that's a really close-knit community". Or "it's really hard to get
into that community". What does that actually mean? There's actually social scientists who study this
and can help us understand how those relationships form and then what happens when they're
threatened, which I think a lot of small towns in the US but across the world have also been wrestling a
lot with this. What happens when all the young people leave? What happens when it's really hard to get
people to be the teachers at that small school or be the doctors?
Melinda Lewis:
How do you enter in to those communities and getting the data?
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
There's been projects I've started and I haven't successfully done that. People just haven't bought into
who I am. There're suspicious often with really good reasons that I'm coming from an elite background.
Maybe I'm going to treat what they've experienced with doubt, which who wants to be doubted.
Especially if I'm talking to folks about things that are really important to them, like environmental justice
issues or the future of the community that they and their families have invested in for generations, this
is important stuff. If they don't really know or trust that I'm going to do good by them and at least
accurately capture what they're saying, even if I might systematically analyze it, which is what my job is
as a sociologist; then it's completely fine for them to say no. I've had that happen.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
In some cases, I've really just selected situations where I have a stake in it. My dissertation was on
looking at a rural community in Iron County, Wisconsin that used to mine iron and then a steel mill
community at the opposite end of that same system in Chicago. The happenstance that I grew up in a
coal-mining community outside of Pittsburgh has actually really helped. Well, we don't often think about
rural and urban as part of the same story, but they're absolutely part of the same story, especially in
terms of the industrialization or massive economic or environmental changes.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
By thinking about how rural communities were impacted differently than urban communities and how
people in those places used their landscapes differently or used their social relationships differently to
make ends meet after the company's closed, we can start learning about why does rural and urban
matter? We don't actually interrogate that. I think a lot of pop culture, we just assume that rural people
are different than urban people. Well what does that actually mean? What are the resources on the
ground? I'm thinking here socially, culturally, but also just practically; how do those geographical
locations actually shape people's experience of home and place so we can actually start understanding
what that looks like.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
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I have to lay something on the line of me. That's been really helpful for a lot of interviewees because
they've in their interviews, have actually said, "Well, you understand this what I'm talking about, right?
You've seen your town die slowly as the economic forces change and all the jobs go somewhere else."
It's like, "Yeah, I have totally seen that and it's really hard." I don't live in that town anymore because
there aren't a lot of job options there. My friends who have stayed struggled with that. Having these
points of connection that are really genuine, they're also vulnerable. I think that we owe that to
whoever we're researching because these are people living life.
Speaker 3:
Hey, it's your mom. I have a question about that podcast you do. Are you on the Instagram or the
Twitter or the Facebook? If I have an idea for a podcast, how do I get in touch with you? Love you. Bye.
Melinda Lewis:
What's up mom? You can find us on all those things actually. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Just go to
Popquestpod on any one of those and follow. If you want to send us ideas, you can either go over to our
website and leave us a message at popqpodcast or you can get us directly popq@drexel.edu. You can
actually find us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher. I can help set it up when I get home, but then you have to
promise me to rate and review. All right, love you. Bye.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
I also want to make sure anytime I go into a community I try to do a lot of research even before I talk to
folks to show that I think that their story, their history in a place is valuable enough for me to have spent
some time doing the work. Reading the books that have been locally published, reading the newspaper
articles, talking to farmers, asking them about the farm crisis in the 1980s and understanding what that
means when I ask them about that.
Speaker 5:
We're losing ground every day to corporations and ag business. Somebody needs to be out there in a
national spotlight, shining their lights on the small family farms to keep them alive and keep them
relevant.
Speaker 6:
We should be interested in knowing where our food comes from. If it comes from the soil that is
organic, that are grown by our family farmers we know it's more healthy than the food grown with by
big corporations who saturate the soil with chemicals and pesticides.
Melinda Lewis:
How do you converge all of these stories that are told in different ways into something that is cohesive?
I don't know how you do that. I also think that your work is incredibly accessible. It's really nice to have
an academic paper use the word gruff or provide the texture of people's lives.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
I'm so glad you find the work accessible because that's really important to me. I want my work to at
least be 80% completely readable by people who I interview. That 20% is actually what draws these
different stories together for me, that remaining maybe slightly unreadable part. That's the idea of
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social theory. Social theory is where sociology is not journalism because we're actually looking for
systematic patterns that maybe we recognize from other situations.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
One of the best learning experiences I've had for writing excessively are other writers who aren't
necessarily academics, but who are making some sort of clear argument based on stories, based on
data. They're not letting the story itself disappear, but they're also not just leaving it as a story. They're
also helping the reader interpret what's going on and link that smaller story within something bigger.
One writer I love is Wendell Berry. Barry used to be a professor at the University of Kentucky and he left
that position, he's in his late eighties now, in order to be an essayist. Essentially to write non-fiction and
some fiction essays reflecting on people's relationship to place.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Something he does really powerfully is always links both personal and broader experiences and stories
of how people are in place, especially in the United States, with some themes of what does it mean to
stay long term in place? What does it mean to leave a place? What does it mean to wrestle with
significant pollution or economic capital flight from a region? So constantly drawing in those smaller
scale stories into a bigger story of what does American capitalism look like has been an incredibly useful
tool for me as I think about similar questions as a sociologist.
Melinda Lewis:
I would love to follow along this Wendell Berry line, but how did you come across his work?
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
I first came across the work in college actually, and it wasn't in a class, it was just that Wendell Berry
became really cool in the early 2000s. He's been writing since the seventies, so it's not like we
discovered anything new. Then as I started graduate school, I actually found Wendell Berry's mentor,
Wallace Stegner, who was a fiction writer for the most part, incredibly helpful too, because fiction
writers are beautiful writers typically. Stegner wrote about this phrase "boomers and stickers" that I just
found incredibly useful. Berry quotes Stegner amply in his own writing, but Wallace Stegner wrote about
how some people just pillage the earth and move on. Boomers can be really aggressive and greedy, but
also maybe that's just the American way to be on the road like Grapes of Wrath, like the Joad family just
continuing on the road towards California. Then other peoples stay in one place, they stick to a place.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
There might be ways we might be like the stickers, they are sticks in the mud. They're afraid of change.
There're different ways we can say this, or we can romanticize the stickers and be like, "Wow, they have
so much affection for place. They're committed." Usually it's some mix of the two. I found that it was so
excessively put, like of course we get that intuitively right? We're like, "Oh yeah, some people just move
on. They kind of make a mess and move on." Then there's another category of people who just stick
around and they deal with whatever aftermath of that boom might be occurring. These are ways of
capturing essentially an American experience of ways of being in place that was just so simply put by
Stegner that it captured my imagination and it gave me this handle that I could hang onto for a whole
mess of social problems that fascinated me.
Melinda Lewis:
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It's also very exciting to me. I love that genealogy of like, "Oh, this person begets this person. This
person begets that person."
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
There's also some short stories he's written, Crossing to Safety. Then I'm even thinking of like Yaa Gyasi's
Homegoing. What fiction's trying to do is they're capturing a moment in time for a particular group of
people and how they're experiencing their own histories, their own places. You probably won't find me
assigning a lot of fiction in most of my classes, but if someone is trying to learn how to write and
communicate about really complicated social things in a way that grabs our attention but is also
accurate, then very good fiction is excellent.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Now not all fiction is created equal, just like not all non-fiction is created equal. There's also some
memoirs that often will pose as social science that actually I think do more harm than good because
they have uninterrogated stereotypes, for instance. I think really good fiction can set us up to think
about how to talk about the places that people care about in language that make other people care
about those places too. This means going beyond census data or geographic description. It means
talking about emotions, talking about the labor of our hands, talking about the ways that our memories
overlap in landscapes.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
There're scholars who actually do this really well and provide us with tools and language where we can
talk about human relationship to place in a very emotive way that non-academics are going to
recognize, which is great; but that also can still point scholars towards more questions that we can ask
of similar places.
Speaker 3:
Are there any examples of things that you think represent that well? I guess part of that would also be
defining what do we mean by representing place well.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Americans talk about their rural areas in fiction in really interesting ways, both positive and negative. I
think we have really complicated relationships to all of our places, but I don't think it means
representing absolutely every perspective that every person who has ever lived in a place will have of
that place. That's too much to ask. That means that whenever I'm very critical of particularly non-fiction,
that pretends to represent the totality of what a place is about, that's what I'm critical of. I'm pretty
critical of Hillbilly Elegy or instance.
Speaker 10:
I know I could have done better, but you got to decide if you want to be somebody or not.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
As a memoir it's a decent memoir, but the problem is we've got folks who don't live in Appalachia who
are using the memoir as social science to categorize an entire diverse heterogeneous region with a line
of stereotypes essentially that reflect one person's experience, but then are portrayed both in the book
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and in popular discourse as capturing everyone's experience and thus proposing certain policy solutions.
That's where I get little red flags going up. There are situations where we can get policy proposals from
really systematic and thoughtful studies that look at cross sections of a community or looks at one
particular segment of a population within the community, and those policy solutions can be just so
grounded and rooted in what's going on.
Melinda Lewis:
I think for me, particularly when we think about the Rust Belt, there's no sense of anybody experiencing
anything in the Feelings Wheel that corresponds with happy, and I feel like that doesn't align with
experience just generally.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Certainly if you're reading something about a huge disaster, most people are just going to be really
traumatized and sad. If you're reading what could be considered a real community study and there's
only one emotion, even though the study is covering a lot of time in a lot of different groups of people,
then that's a red flag to me because we're really complicated people. Something in my own book that
I'm wrestling with now on the Rust Belt Rural Urban Cases, is thinking about and taking very seriously
how people who have lived in places for a long time experience the trauma of massive economic change
that happened during the industrialization like a lot of folks in the Rust Belt, but also love where they
live. Even though their choices might not be as many, they're still making choices and saying, "I have
chosen to stay here and I love where I live. I love the seasons. I love my neighbors. It's a hard place to
live. It drives me nuts, but I also am really glad to live here."
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Isn't that what it means to be human? We're constantly wrestling with the sense that we are of course
agents of our own destiny, but yet we're not. I want to capture that complexity of emotion because
again, really good fiction totally does this. I think really good nonfiction can also do this. It can also tap
into that joy while also pointing out structural issues that are constraining those menus of options.
Melinda Lewis:
I just came across the Feelings Wheel recently in life and was like, "Wow, there are a lot." I think that we
are often pushed to divorce ourselves from being fully embodied and really thinking about what you're
saying of feeling life and feeling space and just existing.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
I think we all need the Feelings Wheel. I should take Feelings Wheels to my interviews and be like, "
[inaudible 00:21:01] your feelings here". Then I want to take the Feelings Wheels to both academics and
non academics who aren't familiar with Rust Belt communities and say, "Look at how many different
feelings are actually showing up if you really listen to the stories I'm sharing in the interview, the quotes
that are in my book." We can start complicated the discussion a little bit beyond this black and white,
are you moving forward or stuck in the past discourse that I think is just too overwhelming in our
popular political moment.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
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I always try to communicate to students we're entering a conversation either through formal scholarship
or journalism or just literally talking to each other. We're constantly building on knowledge towards this
pursuit of understanding how the world works. Citation practices, that's part of just acknowledging that
you're part of a conversation, that you're not the next hot thing that's suddenly out of nowhere
discovered some great new idea. You're building on the labors of other people and the thoughts and
experiences of past generations. But
Melinda Lewis:
I don't think we talk about enough about that sense of responsibility, but also sense of community with
texts that continue to live and breathe.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Yeah, it's absolutely empowering and it's not just for people in college.
Melinda Lewis:
Yeah, I was thinking about the same excitement of finding yourself, at least when I was 13 or 14, on a
message board for something that I really liked.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Yes, I love that analogy. I mean, we were probably the generation of AOL Messenger and chat rooms.
Melinda Lewis:
Absolutely.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
I was really into horses and finding other horse people, talking about things that among my friends I was
just like this weird nerdy girl who really liked reading horse books.
Melinda Lewis:
Saddle Club.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Exactly, but then jumping in to a message board and being able to connect with all these people who
similarly maybe felt out of place locally, but then connected digitally, or maybe there're ways we could
find those commonalities locally, but just a different social group. Just really empowering because it
meant we're not alone. I don't feel like we want to be alone as humans.
Melinda Lewis:
Thank you so much for hanging out with us and talking about all of this. I think your work is really cool.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu:
Thanks. It's been so fun to chat with you today.
Melinda Lewis:
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Pop the Question was researched and hosted by Dr. Melinda Lewis. Our theme music and episodes are
produced by Brian Kantorek with additional audio production by Noah Levine. All of this was done under
the directorship of Erica Zelinger, the deanship of Dr. Paula Marantz Cohen and the Pennoni Honors
College at Drexel University.
Speaker 12:
I know it's important. I do. I honestly do. But we talking about practice, man. What are we talking about?
Speaker 11:
Practice.
Speaker 12:
We talking about practice, man.