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This paper compares two cases of contested mining proposals in the Upper Midwest region of the U.S. to examine how mining companies attempt to respond to opposition and secure regulatory approval ....

Researchers are predicting that the spatially uneven distribution of climate change risks will further exacerbate the inequalities of environmental change in the coming decades. This case study of coffee offers a window into the feedback loops of ecological health, agricultural economies, and social well-being on a quickly warming planet. Drawing from a review of research across disciplines, we explore three human-driven factors that have increased the risks of loss for coffee producers in the face of climate change. These three characteristics of the coffee commodity chain—geographical consolidation, genetic variation, and market factors—enmesh social, ecological, and economic expectations of coffee as a high-value agricultural product. Considering the impact of climate change on coffee production sheds light on how climate change interacts with preexisting ecological, social, and economic challenges of global, agricultural production.

• Home is a combination of material resources, social construction, and embodied experiences.

In this paper, I discuss the rise and fall of transportation as a lived metaphor for people who live in deindustrialized regions of the United States. I ask two questions: 1) how do people who live in regions of consistent economic decline interpret the meanings of absent transportation? And thus, 2) what does transportation maintenance look like in those regions? This line of inquiry emerged unexpectedly from a broader interview project. Between 2015 and 2017, I conducted 90 interviews in two communities at opposite ends of a former, Midwestern steel commodity chain. In both a rural, iron mining community and an urban steel manufacturing neighborhood, transportation infrastructure emerged unbidden and central in interviewees’ descriptions of boom and bust. The late 19th and early 20th century construction of industrial transportation—rail, shipping, and roadways—was recalled by interviewees as facilitating both economic growth and cultural connection required for the social thriving of these communities. The closure of the anchor companies in these communities, then, was the climax in interviewees’ narratives, and the decline (both intentional and natural) of industrial transportation infrastructure appeared again and again as a visible, experienced, and emotional metaphor of the gradual disconnection and loss they experienced. References to declines in industrial transportation often segued to frustrations about the uneven distribution of public transportation (bus and passenger train) or highways. Declines in industrial employment and infrastructures propelled massive depopulation in my case study regions; depopulation, in turn, caused disinvestment in public transportation. This paper expands on the transportation track themes of marginalization of certain segments of the population, with a particular focus on the lived experiences of deindustrialization.

This project probes how the circulation of natural resources shapes contemporary land use and environmental identities in the American Rust Belt. Drawing on data from historical archives, original interviews, and ethnography, I examine two cases—one rural and one urban—of boom and bust in a now-defunct, Midwestern iron and steel commodity chain. From this data, I ask how and why natural resources remain ideologically and economically central to post-industrial communities. I demonstrate how the mobility of capital reproduces environmental, economic, and social inequalities.This project revises our understanding of natural resource commodification by probing the tensions between the political economies of industrial capitalism and the place-based nature of social life. Specifically, I argue that post-deindustrialization, the commodification of nature continues to shape land use, infrastructures, and residents’ imaginaries of community identity and economic development. My argument is as follows. First, I draw on historical data to demonstrate how natural resource capitalism not only takes place, but it makes place. I show how the historical political economies of land use constructed persistent infrastructures and ideologies in the communities central to my study. Contemporary interviews reveal how long-term residents contemplate the past as they narrate their identities, reasons for staying, and ideal futures in their de-industrialized communities. Finally, I interrogate contemporary conflicts between possible revivals of industry and a new generation of tourism built on other “natural resources.” This project sheds light on why certain communities continue to center their identities, economic prospects, and perceptions of nature around the concept of natural resources, and offers wide-reaching implications concerning addressing structural and cultural components of human-environment decision-making.

Sociologists tend to view rural culture as an inertial force, committing members to past cultural patterns which, in turn, inform their present courses of action. By emphasizing such cultural stasis, we obscure how members of cultural enclaves negotiate, recommit to, or revise certain cultural traditions. This article explores how rural culture is in dialogue with changing external contexts. Drawing on interviews I conducted among a small group of German-heritage farmers in southern Wisconsin, I find that farmers select legal arrangements, entrepreneurial actions, and traditional male succession in order to fulfill the “yeoman” goal of keeping the farm in the family name. I explore how the narratives farmers develop about the cultural priority of transferring the home-farm to a new generation allow sociological insight into their creative negotiations between cultural traditions and a greatly altered context of agricultural production. I argue that this dialogue between a historically persistent cultural tradition and very present pressures of agricultural production makes a significant contribution to the dynamics of modern rural life.