As a social scientist who has attended to JD Vance’s writing as part of my research, I was surprised when Trump selected him as his running mate. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is one of the case studies in my ongoing research study on globalization at the intersection of various cross-border crises through selected case countries: the United States, the United Kingdom and China.
Like Vron Ware’s Return of a Native and Peter Hessler’s River Town, both of which are also part of my research, Vance’s book presents an ethnographic account of the effects of economic globalization on small communities, focusing on post-industrial Appalachian communities and his hometown of Middletown, Ohio.
His story reflects my research findings: peripheral regions — be it the Rust Belt in the U.S., the English countryside or the Chinese river town of Fuling — are never immune to the “slow violence” of global capitalism, which is less visible at the centre of power.
