Comparison is a powerful tool for illuminating how and why certain mechanisms or processes shape similar or different outcomes in particular cases. This talk considers two cases of deindustrialization—one rural, one urban—to demonstrate how comparison across space can be useful to scholars of rural development. Rather than traditional comparative designs that require researchers to select and contrast cases along a set of pre-determined variables, certain comparative research designs allow researchers to move across scale, space, and time to answer questions emerging from the comparison itself. In this event, we will consider the epistemological bases, possible challenges, and interpretative tools required for generative rural-urban comparison in qualitative research.
About Amanda McMillan Lequieu
McMillan Lequieu is an environmental sociologist of work and home. Her research interrogates the relationship between the material flows of capitalism, the risks of nature-based livelihoods, and the stability of social life in place. She focuses on two groups of people: working-class communities who are directly impacted by the labor of turning nature into commodities and elites of capitalism who control the movement of capital through these places.
McMillan Lequieu received her PhD in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she is now an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. You can learn more about her body of work on her website. McMillan Lequieu’s new book, Who we are is where we are: Making home in the American Rustbelt, 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 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.