Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Cornbread Convocations and Dancin’ Dumplin’s: Engaged Scholarship Programs in Appalachian Foodways
Session Abstract or Summary
As Appalachian food currently experiences its moment in the national food-trend cycle, for better or worse, programs within the region are engaged in rigorous community-based scholarship to document, preserve, celebrate, and inspire conversation around the diverse food traditions of the mountain South. The Appalachian Food Summit, a community of writers, scholars, chefs, farmers, brewers, restauranteurs, community activists, and traditional mountain food enthusiasts, has hosted three annual gatherings, and has recently published its three-year strategic plan. Hindman Settlement School continues its strong emphasis on foodways in its cultural heritage programming and in December held its second annual Dancin’ and Dumplin’s event, a weekend of workshops celebrating traditional music and food. The Southern Foodways Alliance Oral History Program is currently conducting several projects in the region, including an Eastern Kentucky Chili Bun Trail. And the West Virginia Folklife Program, founded in 2015, is engaged in a statewide folklife fieldwork survey that includes documentation of home cooks and diverse food traditions, and recently completed a foodways oral history project in the Swiss community of Helvetia, WV. In this discussion with Appalachian Food Summit co-chair Lora Smith, Hindman Settlement School program director Jacob Mack-Boll, Southern Foodways Alliance oral historian Sara Wood, and West Virginia state folklorist Emily Hilliard, panelists will share the work of their respective programs and discuss how they are convening writers, scholars, farmers, chefs, community members, traditional home cooks, and activists around the region to inspire and leverage scholarship, advocacy, and economic and cultural development related to Appalachian foodways. The panel will be moderated by Appalachian Food Summit board member Amelia Kirby.
Presentation #1 Title
Setting an Inclusive Appalachian Table: Lessons from the first 4-years of the Appalachian Food Summit
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
The Appalachian Food Summit is a community of writers, scholars, chefs, farmers, brewers, restauranteurs, community activists and traditional mountain food enthusiasts gathered around the table to honor the past, celebrate the present and support a sustainable future for Appalachian food and people. Founded in 2013, the first Summit gathering was hosted in the Spring of 2014 at the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Kentucky and garnished national media attention. Since then, the Summit has hosted an additional two annual gatherings, drawing hundreds of participants from the Appalachian region and beyond, for a day long symposium and dinner. Currently housed with Grow Appalachia at Berea College, the Summit seeks to be a movement building network that balances academic and advocacy interests by connecting scholars and writers with policy makers, farmers, chefs and others working in the local foods and agriculture sector. Lora Smith, co-chair of the Appalachian Food Summit, will share the organization’s vision for the next three years of development and engage the audience in a conversation on how the Food Summit can better serve the Appalachian Studies Association community and advance Appalachian foodways scholarship and research.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Lora Smith is a co-founder and the current board co-chair of the Appalachian Food Summit. She regularly writes about Appalachian foodways for regional and national publications and is currently editing an Appalachian foodways reader. Her work has been featured in Gravy, NPR, PUNCH and The New York Times. A native of Southeastern Kentucky, Lora comes from a background of social justice engagement in Appalachia. She is a former Communications Associate for the grassroots group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, where her media and storytelling work supported environmental and economic justice organizing in coalfield communities. She served as the National Outreach Director for Deep Down (2010), an Emmy-award winning documentary on mountaintop removal that aired nationally on PBS’s Independent Lens. And most recently Lora served as the Network Officer for Central Appalachia at the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation where she directed the Foundation’s strategic grantmaking in support of a just Appalachian economic transition. Smith serves on the Steering Committee of the Appalachia Funders Network (AFN) where she chairs the AFN’s Food and Agriculture Systems Working Group that is helping to craft strategy and vision for a regional food system. And she is a board member of the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, KY. Smith is a former Southeast Council of Foundations (SECF) Hull Fellow and in 2015 received the Southern Foodways Alliance’s John Egerton Prize. She holds a B.A. in Individualized Studies from New York University and studied Folklore as a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill. Lora lives and works from Big Switch Farm, her family’s certified organic farm in the foothills of Eastern Kentucky.
Presentation #2 Title
Documenting Folklife and Foodways in West Virginia
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
The West Virginia Folklife Program was founded at the West Virginia Humanities Council in November 2015 upon receiving support of a National Endowment for the Arts Folk & Traditional Arts Partnership Grant and hiring West Virginia’s first official state folklorist. A central task in the first years of this new cultural heritage program is a statewide folklife fieldwork survey, documenting traditional artists, musicians, craftspeople, home cooks, cultural communities, and other tradition bearers. Due to this expansive scope, the survey must often favor breadth over depth. As a counterbalance, however, West Virginia Folklife partnered with the Southern Foodways Alliance on a year-long foodways project in the Swiss community of Helvetia, conducting oral histories with traditional home cooks and bakers, farmers, wine and cheesemakers, and chefs at the town’s Hutte restaurant. This project allowed for a focused and nuanced documentation of a single community and established a model for future documentation projects centered around food and other traditional art forms. State folklorist Emily Hilliard will present on this work and other foodways-based projects of the West Virginia Folklife Program, discussing how the Program seeks to embed a crucial preservation element and cultural heritage perspective within existing and future agri- and food-based tourism in the state, and consider how community elders, recipe carriers, and cultural communities can be supported to be the main stakeholders in their own foodways documentation, scholarship, and economic development.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Emily Hilliard is the West Virginia state folklorist and founder of the West Virginia Folklife Program. She holds an M.A. in folklore from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a B.A. in English and French from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Hilliard has worked at cultural heritage institutions including Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the National Council for the Traditional Arts, Sandy Spring Museum/Maryland Traditions, and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. From 2008-2014, she taught literature, creative writing, and cultural courses at the University of Michigan’s New England Literature Program, an intensive place-based living and learning community in the woods of Maine. Hilliard is a 2016 recipient of the American Folklife Center’s Henry Reed Fund Award for a public programming and documentation project highlighting the career of ballad singer Phyllis Marks, and was a 2014 Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives Fellow for research and publication on East Kentucky banjo player Nora E. Carpenter. Her writing about foodways, music, traditional culture, and other work has been published by NPR, Ecotone, UNC Press’ quarterly Southern Cultures, and the Southern Foodways Alliance’s James Beard Award-winning Gravy, among others. She is also the author of the pie blog Nothing in the House.
Presentation #3 Title
On the Trail of Country Hams and Chili Buns: The Southern Foodways Alliance Oral History Project
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
Founded in 1999, the Southern Foodways Alliance (based at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi) documents, studies, and explores the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. Our work sets a welcome table where all may consider our history and our future in a spirit of respect and reconciliation. We collect oral histories, produce films and podcasts, publish writing, sponsor scholarship, mentor students, and stage events that serve as progressive and inclusive catalysts for the greater South. Previous SFA documentary work in Appalachia focused on the foodways traditions of the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, Virginia, and a regional project documenting curing traditions. Most recently the SFA has partnered with the West Virginia Folklife Program to document the Hutte restaurant in Helvetia, WV, and it’s currently working on an oral history project documenting eastern Kentucky chili buns, a working-class food with ties to the Great Depression, pool halls, the intricate railroad system, and the coal mining industry. By interviewing past and present owners of establishments serving this dish, the project examines the role of race, class, and gender in eastern Kentucky. SFA oral historian Sara Wood will present some of the stories from the chili bun project and speak about the importance of collaboration between local producers and documentarians outside of the region to ensure respect for the voices where the stories emerged, and creating archival access and preservation efforts.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Sara Wood is the lead oral historian for the Southern Foodways Alliance, based at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. She spends her days driving across the American South documenting stories behind the region’s foodways from oyster shuckers of Chesapeake Bay to slugburger purveyors of Selmer, Tennessee. She manages the work of oral history collaborators from around the country. Before moving to Mississippi, Wood reported stories for WHQR Public Radio in Wilmington, North Carolina, as well as National Public Radio’s State of the Re:Union, and Atlantic Public Media/Transom.org. She’s produced sound installations for museums and cultural sites such as the Whitney, the New York Public Library, SFMoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Park Service. She’s received grants for her work from the Schlesinger Library/Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and the Kentucky Historical Society. Her writing has been published in Southern Cultures, Gravy, and South Writ Large. Wood teaches oral history workshops throughout the South focusing on methods and approaches, fieldwork, interviewer/narrator relationships, creating new content derived from archival sources, and disseminating oral history projects outside of traditional libraries and archives.
Presentation #4 Title
Dumplings and Dancin': Growing Appalachia through vernacular dance, food and farming
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
The Hindman Settlement School strives to celebrate local culture and heritage while providing community services to meet the challenges and needs of our area. As a part of this, HSS has chosen to focus more attention on local food security and foodways work, including a Grow Appalachia partnership now in its third year, and an experiential event in its second year called Dumplin's and Dancin' that lifts up heritage dance and foodways from the region. The idea is that this serves to complement the day-to-day work of supporting home gardeners and small farmers in growing healthy, organic food for themselves and the county. New projects are emerging from this work, including strengthening the capacity of the local farmers market, laying the groundwork for a community canning kitchen, food-related educational programming with the Settlement's Dyslexia summer program students, and working towards farm-to-school programs in the county. The Hindman Settlement School understands that foodways offer cultural, economic, and social value for the region. The importance of events like Dumplin's and Dancin' is to draw together these pieces and connect the local community to broader conversations.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Jacob Mack-Boll serves as Program Director for the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Kentucky. There he oversees folk arts and cultural heritage programming, which has expanded to include local foods and foodways. Jacob holds a BA in Peacebuilding and Development from Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Presentation #5 Title
N/A- Amelia is our convener/facilitator
Presentation #5 Abstract or Summary
N/A
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #5
Amelia Kirby is an Appalachian activist, cultural worker and small business owner. Most recently, she worked as the communications and development coordinator at the Appalachian Citizens' Law Center, a non-profit law firm providing free legal work for people impacted by the extraction industries of the Appalachian coalfields. In addition to her work at ACLC, she is the co-owner of Summit City Lounge, a restaurant/bar/music venue in Whitesburg, KY. Her work has been featured on NPR, the Bob Edwards Show, and in the New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, The American Prospect and Rolling Stone.
Setting an Inclusive Appalachian Table: Lessons from the first 4-years of the Appalachian Food Summit
The Appalachian Food Summit is a community of writers, scholars, chefs, farmers, brewers, restauranteurs, community activists and traditional mountain food enthusiasts gathered around the table to honor the past, celebrate the present and support a sustainable future for Appalachian food and people. Founded in 2013, the first Summit gathering was hosted in the Spring of 2014 at the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Kentucky and garnished national media attention. Since then, the Summit has hosted an additional two annual gatherings, drawing hundreds of participants from the Appalachian region and beyond, for a day long symposium and dinner. Currently housed with Grow Appalachia at Berea College, the Summit seeks to be a movement building network that balances academic and advocacy interests by connecting scholars and writers with policy makers, farmers, chefs and others working in the local foods and agriculture sector. Lora Smith, co-chair of the Appalachian Food Summit, will share the organization’s vision for the next three years of development and engage the audience in a conversation on how the Food Summit can better serve the Appalachian Studies Association community and advance Appalachian foodways scholarship and research.
