Rereading Appalachia

Rereading Appalachia PDF Author: Sara Webb-Sunderhaus
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081316561X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Appalachia faces overwhelming challenges that plague many rural areas across the country, including poorly funded schools, stagnant economic development, corrupt political systems, poverty, and drug abuse. Its citizens, in turn, have often been the target of unkind characterizations depicting them as illiterate or backward. Despite entrenched social and economic disadvantages, the region is also known for its strong sense of culture, language, and community. In this innovative volume, a multidisciplinary team of both established and rising scholars challenge Appalachian stereotypes through an examination of language and rhetoric. Together, the contributors offer a new perspective on Appalachia and its literacy, hoping to counteract essentialist or class-based arguments about the region's people, and reexamine past research in the context of researcher bias. Featuring a mix of traditional scholarship and personal narratives, Rereading Appalachia assesses a number of pressing topics, including the struggles of first-generation college students and the pressure to leave the area in search of higher-quality jobs, prejudice toward the LGBT community, and the emergence of Appalachian and Affrilachian art in urban communities. The volume also offers rich historical perspectives on issues such as the intended and unintended consequences of education activist Cora Wilson Stewart's campaign to promote literacy at the Kentucky Moonlight Schools. A call to arms for those studying the heritage and culture of Appalachia, this timely collection provides fresh perspectives on the region, its people, and their literacy beliefs and practices.

Rereading Appalachia

Rereading Appalachia PDF Author: Sara Webb-Sunderhaus
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081316561X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book

Book Description
Appalachia faces overwhelming challenges that plague many rural areas across the country, including poorly funded schools, stagnant economic development, corrupt political systems, poverty, and drug abuse. Its citizens, in turn, have often been the target of unkind characterizations depicting them as illiterate or backward. Despite entrenched social and economic disadvantages, the region is also known for its strong sense of culture, language, and community. In this innovative volume, a multidisciplinary team of both established and rising scholars challenge Appalachian stereotypes through an examination of language and rhetoric. Together, the contributors offer a new perspective on Appalachia and its literacy, hoping to counteract essentialist or class-based arguments about the region's people, and reexamine past research in the context of researcher bias. Featuring a mix of traditional scholarship and personal narratives, Rereading Appalachia assesses a number of pressing topics, including the struggles of first-generation college students and the pressure to leave the area in search of higher-quality jobs, prejudice toward the LGBT community, and the emergence of Appalachian and Affrilachian art in urban communities. The volume also offers rich historical perspectives on issues such as the intended and unintended consequences of education activist Cora Wilson Stewart's campaign to promote literacy at the Kentucky Moonlight Schools. A call to arms for those studying the heritage and culture of Appalachia, this timely collection provides fresh perspectives on the region, its people, and their literacy beliefs and practices.

Literacy in the Mountains

Literacy in the Mountains PDF Author: Samantha NeCamp
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813178878
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
After the 2016 presidential election, popular media branded Appalachia as "Trump Country," decrying its inhabitants as ignorant fearmongers voting against their own interests. And since the 1880s, there have been many, including travel writers and absentee landowners, who have framed mountain people as uneducated and hostile. These stereotypes ultimately ward off potential investments in the region's educational system and skew how students understand themselves and the place they call home. Attacking these misrepresentations head on, Literacy in the Mountains: Community, Newspapers, and Writing in Appalachia reclaims the long history of literacy in the Appalachian region. Focusing on five Kentucky newspapers printed between 1885 and 1920, Samantha NeCamp explores the complex ways readers in the mountains negotiated their local and national circumstances through editorials, advertisements, and correspondence. In local newspapers, community action groups announced meeting times and philanthropists raised funds for a network of hitherto unknown private schools. Preserved in print, these stories and others reveal an engaged citizenry specifically concerned with education. Combining literacy and journalism studies, NeCamp demonstrates that Appalachians are not—and never have been—an illiterate, isolated people.

Engaging Appalachia

Engaging Appalachia PDF Author: Rebecca Adkins Fletcher
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813196965
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Inclusive campus-community collaborations provide critical opportunities to build community capacity—defined as a community's ability to jointly respond to challenges and opportunities—and sustainability. Through case studies from across all three subregions of Appalachia from Georgia to Pennsylvania, Engaging Appalachia: A Guidebook for Building Capacity and Sustainability offers diverse perspectives and guidance for promoting social change through campus-community relationships from faculty, community members, and student contributors. This volume explores strategies for creating more inclusive and sustainable partnerships through the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. In representing diverse areas, environments, and issues, three relatable themes emerge within a practice viewpoint that is scalable to communities beyond Appalachia: fostering student leadership, asset-building, and needs fulfillment within community engagement. Engaging Appalachia presents collaborative approaches to regional community engagement and offers important lessons in place-based methods for achieving sustainable and just development. Written with practicality in mind, this guidebook embraces hard-earned experiences from decades of work in Appalachia and sets forth new models for building community resilience in a changing world.

Appalachia Revisited

Appalachia Revisited PDF Author: Yunina Barbour-Payne
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813166993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Front cover -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 Revisiting Appalachia, Revisiting Self -- 2 Carolina Chocolate Drops -- 3 Beyond a Wife's Perspective on Politics -- 4 Intersections of Appalachian Identity -- 5 Appalachia Beyond the Mountains -- 6 Digital Rhetorics of Appalachia and the Cultural Studies Classroom -- 7 Continuity and Change of English Consonants in Appalachia -- 8 Frackonomics -- 9 Revisiting Appalachian Icons in the Production and Consumption of Tourist Art -- 10 From the Coal Mine to the Prison Yard -- 11 Walking the Fence Line of The Crooked Road -- 12 "No One's Ever Talked to Us Before" -- 13 Strength in Numbers -- 14 When Collaboration Leads to Action -- 15 Participation and Transformation in Twenty-First-Century Appalachian Scholarship -- (Re)introduction -- Appendix -- Contributors -- Index.

Appalachia in Regional Context

Appalachia in Regional Context PDF Author: Dwight B. Billings
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081317533X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In an increasingly globalized world, place matters more than ever. Nowhere is that more true than in Appalachian studies -- a field which brings scholars, activists, artists, and citizens together around a region to contest misappropriations of resources and power and combat stereotypes of isolation and intolerance. In Appalachian studies, the diverse ways in which place is invoked, the person who invokes it, and the reasons behind that invocation all matter greatly. In Appalachia in Regional Context: Place Matters, Dwight B. Billings and Ann E. Kingsolver bring together voices from a variety of disciplines to broaden the conversation. The book begins with chapters challenging conventional representations of Appalachia by exploring the relationship between regionalism, globalism, activism, and everyday experience theoretically. Other chapters examine foodways, depictions of Appalachia in popular culture, and the experiences of rural LGBTQ youth. Poems by renowned social critic bell hooks interleave the chapters and add context to reflections on the region. Drawing on cultural anthropology, sociology, geography, media studies, political science, gender and women's studies, ethnography, social theory, art, music, literature and regional studies pedagogy, this volume furthers the exploration of new perspectives on one of America's most compelling and misunderstood regions.

Religion and Resistance in Appalachia

Religion and Resistance in Appalachia PDF Author: Joseph D. Witt
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813168147
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
In the last fifty years, the Appalachian Mountains have suffered permanent and profound change due to the expansion of surface coal mining. The irrevocable devastation caused by this practice has forced local citizens to redefine their identities, their connections to global economic forces, their pasts, and their futures. Religion is a key factor in the fierce debate over mountaintop removal; some argue that it violates a divine mandate to protect the earth, while others contend that coal mining is a God-given gift to ensure human prosperity and comfort. In Religion and Resistance in Appalachia: Faith and the Fight against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining, Joseph D. Witt examines how religious and environmental ethics foster resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining. Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, teachers, preachers, and community leaders, Witt's research offers a fresh analysis of an important and dynamic topic. His study reflects a diversity of denominational perspectives, exploring Catholic and mainline Protestant views of social and environmental justice, evangelical Christian readings of biblical ethics, and Native and nontraditional spiritual traditions. By placing Appalachian resistance to mountaintop removal in a comparative international context, Witt's work also provides new outlooks on the future of the region and its inhabitants. His timely study enhances, challenges, and advances conversations not only about the region, but also about the relationship between religion and environmental activism.

The Complexities of Authority in the Classroom

The Complexities of Authority in the Classroom PDF Author: Ken Badley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000571106
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This book argues that democratic classroom management is not a stand-alone issue but is deeply intertwined with classroom climate and requires a thoughtful, grounded understanding of classroom authority. Contributors explore the sources, nature, and extent of teacher authority, as they distinguish authority from authoritarianism, and describe how classroom authority is ultimately a shared endeavor between teachers and students. By drawing on a variety of contexts and perspectives, chapters in this volume contend with the complexities inherent in classroom authority through the lenses of gender, urban versus rural contexts, and within elementary and secondary classrooms.

Power and Place

Power and Place PDF Author: Melinda Bollar Wagner
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813197740
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Rural life and culture hold a practical and symbolic importance in American society. A central tenet of the survival of our cherished values—and of ourselves as a species—is the stewardship of cultural diversity and the places that foster it, like rural America. These may be the places that teach us to use land to make a living and to make a life, to forge and carry on our identities, and to feel history. They may yield a harvest of policies for managing an environmental balancing act that will preserve essential resources for America's children's children. Power and Place: Preservation, Progress, and the Culture War over Land examines the ongoing culture wars that pit conservation against economic progress. For author Melinda Bollar Wagner, what began as a study of Appalachia's long-standing and continuing status as an energy sacrifice zone evolved into a twenty-four-year research project that sheds new light on the physical and emotional parameters of cultural attachment to land. Drawing on interviews with more than 220 residents from ten communities in five Appalachian counties, Power and Place gives voice to rural citizens whose place at the table is far from assured with regard to critical energy, environmental, and infrastructure decisions.

The Arthurdale Community School

The Arthurdale Community School PDF Author: Sam F. Stack
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081316690X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This work examines the Arthurdale School, which was created during the Great Depression and dedicated to the purpose of building community and preparing students for participation in democratic society.

Sacred Mountains

Sacred Mountains PDF Author: Andrew R. H. Thompson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813166004
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
On a misty morning in eastern Kentucky, cross-bearing Christians gather for a service on a surface-mined mountain. They pray for the health and renewal of the land and for their communities, lamenting the corporate greed of the mining companies. On another day, in southern West Virginia, Andrew Jordon hosts Bible study in a small cabin overlooking a disused 1,400-acre surface mine. He believes his efforts to reclaim sites like these represent responsible environmental stewardship. In Sacred Mountains, Andrew R. H. Thompson highlights scenes such as these in order to propose a Christian ethical analysis of the controversial mining practice that has increasingly divided the nation and has often led to fierce and even violent confrontations. Thompson draws from the arguments of H. Richard Niebuhr, whose work establishes an ideal foundation for understanding Appalachia. Thompson provides a thorough introduction to the issues surrounding surface mining, including the environmental consequences and the resultant religious debates, and highlights the discussions being carried out in the media and by scholarly works. He also considers five popular perspectives (ecofeminism, liberation theology, environmental justice, environmental pragmatism, and political ecology) and offers his own framework and guidelines for moral engagement with the subject. Thompson's arguments add to the work of other ethicists and theologians by examining the implications of culture in a variety of social, historical, and religious contexts. A groundbreaking and nuanced study that looks past the traditionally conflicting stereotypes about religion and environmental consciousness in Appalachia, Sacred Mountains offers a new approach that unifies all communities, regardless of their beliefs.