The chapter “Middletown Revisited: Everyday Futures in the American Rust Belt” by Patrick Collier and James J. Connolly appears in the newly published edited volume Futures in the History of Deindustrialisation, edited by Liliosa Azara, Eloisa Betti, Stefan Moitra, Francesca Sanna, and Christian Wicke. Published by Bologna University Press, the open-access volume brings together international scholarship examining how communities have imagined, negotiated, and experienced futures in the wake of deindustrialisation.
Drawing on the Everyday Life in Middletown (EDLM) archive, “Middletown Revisited: Everyday Futures in the American Rust Belt” explores how Muncie residents articulate hopes, anxieties, and everyday expectations about the future in a post-industrial community. The chapter demonstrates the value of EDLM diaries for understanding the lived experience of economic transition and community change.
The open-access volume is available here:
https://buponline.com/prodotto/futures-in-the-history-of-deindustrialisation/