Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Identities of Dispossession?: Conflicting Representations of Appalachia
Session Abstract or Summary
This session, "Identities of Dispossession?: Conflicting Representations of Appalachia," represents an interdisciplinary panel bringing together education, sociology, and political economic perspectives to examine the role of Appalachia in ongoing conversations about civic polity and dynamics of social, economic, and spatial exclusions. As Steven Stoll argues in Ramp Hollow, the displacement of American Indians and the enclosure of the Appalachian forest continue to shape communities and individual lives. Two other recent books, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance and What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte, also address these issues, though with different conclusions. This session draws on these works to examine the intersection of topographic, social, cultural, and economic marginalization that is the legacy of 19th century enclosure. What rhetorical purposes does the region serve in the current moment, and what is it about Appalachia that makes it a persistent metaphor for everything that is right and wrong with the United States?
Presentation #1 Title
Imaginaries of American Rurality and the Spatio-Cultural Marginality of the Appalachian Region
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
In the United States social science has tended to methodologically and conceptually frame rural and urban spaces as oppositional and distinct spatial categories. These academic practices have been matched by the deepened entrenchment within mass culture of alternately constructing either rural or urban as “other” – the former largely framed as a socially, culturally and economically marginal space while the latter increasingly framed as a realm of the liberal elite. I discuss these conceptions of space and place from the perspective of rural sociology, paying particular attention to the representations of rurality and rural Appalachian people and places from the standpoint of three recent books, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Steven Stoll’s Ramp Hollow, and Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. I locate these questions in the light of the economic and demographic transformations of rural areas and economies over the past several decades, and the cultural and political role of the rural in the 2016 U.S. elections.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Dr. Schafft is an Associate Professor of Education at The Pennsylvania State University based within the Educational Leadership Program. Dr. Schafft directs the College's Center for Rural Education and Communities and serves as associate editor for the Journal of Research in Rural Education. His research interests broadly concern the relationship between social inequality, spatial inequality and rural development.
Presentation #2 Title
Appalachia Dispossessed: The Political Economy of Marginalization
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
Political economy provides a framework for understanding how social and political phenomena are embedded in historical material relations, and how patterns of economic accumulation and inequality reinforce and are reinforced by relations of power. This presentation provides a political economy analysis of Appalachia’s discursive construction in the current political moment. By highlighting a deep history of enclosure in the region, beginning with the expulsion of Native Americans (Stoll, 2017), we can begin to see how rural livelihood strategies that persisted outside the accumulation imperative of capitalism were systematically dismantled, even as the social patterns that those livelihood strategies supported persisted as anachronism. I will explore how political-economic analyses of the region help navigate the intersection of structure and culture to understand how processes of enclosure and extraction have systemically undermined the social and cultural fabric of Appalachia. From the privatization of the forest commons through the criminalization of moonshining and the rise of extractive industry, I explore how Appalachia and Appalachians are mutually constituted through the rhetoric of social and economic marginality that legitimizes past, present, and future dispossessions.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Dr. Peine is an Associate Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Her research focuses on the role of multinational agribusiness in the global food regime, and the effect this has on prices, populations, and economies.
Presentation #3 Title
When Stereotypes Trump Reality: Disrupting Deficit Narratives
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
As narratives are written and told about Appalachia, there are implications for young people living and learning in the region. This presentation will ask questions about rural stereotype threat—not only within a historical (mis)representation of the hillbilly trope but within a present day Hillbilly "Elegy" trope, punctuated by narratives that exploit Appalachia as weak, destroyed, and hopeless. Appalachia often serves as a metaphor in these texts, a foregone conclusion—but educators can present opportunities for students to critically examine these representations and rewrite the rural narrative. Greenwood’s critical pedagogy of place and the concept of Freire’s conscientização serve as a theoretical frame to critique and deconstruct the neoliberalization of education that devalues the importance of the local and historied identities of place, and allows for the pervasively negative and damning stereotypes of Appalachian people and places. Without a critical literacy frame for evaluating these tropes, students are unable to reinhabit the places they value or to engage in social action that serves to sustain health, economy, and education in Appalachia. How can they recreate a vision of hope or rewrite the narrative on what it means to “live well” within a place when the most vocal narratives are ones shaped by fear and trauma?
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Dr. Amy Azano is an Associate Professor of Adolescent Literacy in the School of Education at Virginia Tech. Her scholarship focuses on rural teacher education, opportunity gaps for rural students (for example, autism and gifted education), and rural literacies. She is the co-Principal Investigator of Promoting PLACE in Rural Schools, a five-year, 1.9 million dollar U.S. Department of Education grant designed to support gifted education programs in high-poverty rural communities.
Imaginaries of American Rurality and the Spatio-Cultural Marginality of the Appalachian Region
In the United States social science has tended to methodologically and conceptually frame rural and urban spaces as oppositional and distinct spatial categories. These academic practices have been matched by the deepened entrenchment within mass culture of alternately constructing either rural or urban as “other” – the former largely framed as a socially, culturally and economically marginal space while the latter increasingly framed as a realm of the liberal elite. I discuss these conceptions of space and place from the perspective of rural sociology, paying particular attention to the representations of rurality and rural Appalachian people and places from the standpoint of three recent books, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Steven Stoll’s Ramp Hollow, and Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. I locate these questions in the light of the economic and demographic transformations of rural areas and economies over the past several decades, and the cultural and political role of the rural in the 2016 U.S. elections.
