Discourse In The Abandoned Small Town Analysis

In 2011, Chad Newbrough Steacy wrote his thesis, Discourse in the Abandoned Small Town: Toward a Critical Geography of Decline. The title must be Steacy’s best expression of his interpretation of the state of affairs in the small town of Sunbury, PA. Steacy elaborates in the heart of his thesis, “An indication of the economic change that has affected Sunbury is the large amount of abandoned industrial space woven into the town’s landscape.” (Steacy, 2011). Clearly, Steacy is writing about a place that has seen better days; a place where the economy has declined because of drooping industry. Professor Courtney Donovan and Professor Jason Henderson served as a committee. Certainly, Professor Donovan for her background in the geography of place (in the context of human and social geography) and Jason Henderson for his background in the geography of cities. Exposing Sunbury’s decline and its resident’s hope for revitalization is Steacy’s objective. He aims to “… add a qualitative account of decline and resistance of small working-class communities to the Marxist-geographic body of knowledge” and to investigate economic decline and social response (Steacy, 2011). The central argument seems to be that “discourse of …show more content…
It features two maps (the city’s location and its location relative to nearby coal), a collection of 1950s Sunbury photos, and two graphs depicting population loss and ethnic diversity. Each figure is accompanied by a caption and citation linked to linked to the works cited section. The book is 161 pages long with 134 text pages with integrated figures, 19 pages of citations, and eight pages consisting of two appendices, not including the first eight pages which include acknowledgements and the table of