My qualitative field work has taken me from homesteads in Swaziland, to kitchen tables in dairyland Wisconsin, to red-dirt roads post-war northern Uganda, and most recently, to urban and rural Rust Belt communities made remote by de-industrialization.
My research and teaching interests center on questions of place and economics, isolation and connection, community and home. I build on sociological literatures of development, economic change, commodity chains, and environment and natural resources, geography’s sense of place theories, and environmental history’s conceptions of space and time. I am passionate about understanding how working class, rural and urban people adapt to changing economies and environments over time, through the lens of collective identity, land tenure, environmental history, and economic development.
Amanda McMillan Lequieu 