College Town Conversations: Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England

Emily Walton will facilitate a group discussion about her new book, Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England.

This is a hybrid event. Join us in the Mayer Room, Howe Library, or online via Zoom.

Set in the Upper Valley, the book considers the recent racial demographic transition in an area widely considered to be progressive. Her analysis of interviews with highly educated, professional migrants of color offers new insights into the processes through which white residents harden social boundaries, even in situations of relative socioeconomic equality. Walton shows how white residents keep a racial hierarchy in place through cultural processes of misrecognition—a failure or unwillingness to see people of color as legitimate, welcome, and valuable members of the community. The ultimate impact of such misrecognition is often a profound sense of homesickness—a deep longing for a place in which one can feel safe, wanted, and accepted—among people of color. Those mental health consequences and the misrecognition from which they stem are a problem not only for people of color hoping to make a home, but for the Upper Valley as a whole. As outmigration, high mortality, and low fertility work together toward rural population decline, Walton offers several strategies that key actors at different levels of the community—from civic and cultural leaders to individual residents—can employ to integrate non-dominant narratives into community life.

Emily Walton is Associate Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College. Her research brings a racial lens and a mixed-methods toolkit to bear on enduring questions in sociology’s health and community subfields.