Speaking of Infrastructures: Industrial Transportation Infrastructure Decline as Symbol of Changing Place Meanings in the American Rust Belt

Abstract

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, I find that speakers repeatedly discussed trains and ships when prompted to make sense of present-day economic hardship. 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. Bringing narrative and infrastructure studies into conversation with structural and cultural strands of deindustrialization research, I suggest 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. This article shows how lived experiences and contemporary interpretations of large-scale political economic processes can be mediated through the material residues of infrastructural decline.