Locals on Local Color: Imagining Identity in Appalachia

Algeo, Katie

doi:10.1353/scu.2003.0041

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The construction of an Appalachian identity and its exaggerated stereotype as being physically isolated, backwards, and timeless compared to the remaining modern United States has been recorded since the American Civil War (1861-1865) (Algeo, 2003). This descriptive word entails more than a geographic location and to some represents a marker for a culture with disparaging implications.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Key Informants' Perspectives Prior to Beginning a Cervical Cancer Study in Ohio Appalachia

et al. 2007

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Higher-than-average cervical cancer incidence and mortality rates occur in Ohio Appalachia. Little is known, however, about societal norms and social determinants that affect these rates. To examine county-level sociocultural environments to plan a cervical cancer prevention program, the authors interviewed key informants from 17 of 29 Ohio Appalachia counties. Findings include the perceived offensiveness of the term Appalachia, the importance of long-standing family ties, urban and rural areas within counties, use and acceptability of tobacco, the view that cancer is a death sentence, and the stigmatization of people with cancer. Barriers to screening included cost, lack of insurance, transportation problems, fear, embarrassment, and privacy issues. These findings highlight the important role of geography, social environment, and culture on health behaviors and health outcomes. The interviews provided information about the unique characteristics of this population that are important when developing effective strategies to address cancer-related health behaviors in this medically underserved population.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Key Informants' Perspectives Prior to Beginning a Cervical Cancer Study in Ohio Appalachia

et al. 2007

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“…While members of a community might share traits or characteristics that lend themselves to being defined as singular units of identity, marginalized community members may deal with in-group conflict differently (Tajfel and Turner, 1979;Haslam et al, 2001;Usborne and Taylor, 2010). For example, Huse and Wendorf Muhamad (2018) examined the social identification of Appalachians, a cultural group within the United States who have been marginalized and stereotyped as unintelligent hillbillies (Billings et al, 1999;Algeo, 2003;Tighe, 2007;Cooke-Jackson and Hansen, 2008;Wood and Hendricks, 2009). In order to address these stereotypes associated with Appalachia, Appalachians strived toward positive distinctiveness by either promoting the positive attributes of the community or by disassociating from the group entirely (Huse and Wendorf Muhamad, 2018).…”

Section: Sit and Managing Unintended Consequences In Cbprmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fundamentals of Social Identity and Social Justice: Considering Social Identity Within CBPR With Marginalized Populations

Huse

2020

Front. Commun.

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Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a research paradigm that works with marginalized populations within health contexts. The partnership between scholars and marginalized populations empowers participants through the pursuit of social justice. However, there has been a cry for standardizing the CBPR approach particularly when working with marginalized populations. Identity is a critical construct to understand within the communities in order to collectively strive toward social justice. This paper examines how social identity theory can aid community-based participatory research teams by (a) illustrating how social identity analysis can facilitate the researcher-community partnership, (b) applying SIT to better understand community behaviors and norms, and (c) using SIT to avoid unintended consequences within CBPR intervention designs. Through understanding identity, relational empowerment can be positively redistributed back to community members. This paper will thus serve as a first step in justifying why more research is needed in incorporating social identity to CBPR intervention designs.

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“…Even when representations of Appalachia do enter the cultural-historical discourse in academia or in the media, African Americans are rarely inscribed into the social heritage of this region-this erasure can be traced through iconic popular media, such as Academy Award winning films such as Coal Miner's Daughter (1980) andHarlan County USA (1976) to contemporary television series, such as Justified (2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) and Kentucky Justice (2013-). In spite of its diversity, depictions of Appalachian culture are primarily constructed through the gaze of outsiders who are in search of the iconic white, poor, toothless, backwards mountaineer (Algeo, 2003 One of the purposes of EKAAMP is to provide a space for these invisible subjects to inscribe themselves in the institutional archives so they will not be written out of history. Before grappling with the specifics of EKAAMP, I turn to two conceptual frameworks, one theoretical and one historical, to help contextualize this project within the broader discourse on the archive.…”

Section: Seeing In-visiblementioning

confidence: 99%

Before they were Diamonds: The Intergenerational Migration of Kentucky's Coal Camp Blacks

Brown¹

2017

Preprint

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My dissertation project is an empirical examination of the ways in which social transformations of the 20th century—read along the grain of the Great Migration—impacted the collective identity of African Americans over space and time. In this work, I will analyze the racialized subjectivity and identity (trans)formation of a diaspora of African Americans who partook in an intergenerational migration from the plantations of central Alabama to the coalfields of southeastern Kentucky in the first half of the 20th century, and then moved on to urban cities throughout the United States throughout the Civil Rights-era. The latter generation of migrants collectively experienced major shifts in the social structures of their community of origin, such as transitioning from “colored schools” to a State mandated integrated school system, retrenchment in the labor economy of a single-industry community, and the subsequent mass out-migration from their community of origin. These jolts to the social structures of their society not only altered their horizon of opportunity, but also resulted in major dislocations in the cultural systems that informed their collective identity. Particular to the case, I am concerned with the ways in which these cultural traumas—memories of events that collectivities believe rended the social fabric of their society—impacted the collective identity of this diaspora. In spite of their geographic dispersion, this generation of migrants has managed to stay connected through a set of “invented traditions” that they constituted at the tail end of their out-migration. For example, the Eastern Kentucky Social Club—an organization established by this group of migrants in 1970—has hosted a reunion in different cities across the country every year for the last forty-four years. At its height, this event drew over 3,000 African American migrants from across the country. The broader aim of the project is to reconstruct the rich history and culture of this special population of Black Appalachians to put forth a re-examination of W.E.B. Du Bois’ phenomenological analysis of racialized subjectivity and African American identity formation in 20th century America.The overarching research questions that guide this study are (1) How do we explain the emergence of their post-migration diasporic identity? (2) How has their collective identity been negotiated, transformed and reinscribed through their changing, and sometimes contested, subjectivity as racialized American citizens through the continuum of the pre and post civil rights era? I will specifically focus on three events that have been the site of transformation for the individuals in my case, (1) the school desegregation process—an event that occurred almost a decade after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in this region, (2) the mass out-migration from southeastern Kentucky—a community level event that was a precursor to the emergence of their diasporic identity, and (3) the construction of the EKAAMP archive—an event that marks the institutional transference from memory to history. These eventful temporalities provide three categories of analysis that will allow me to make important linkages to my research questions in the context of the past, present, and future.

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Locals on Local Color: Imagining Identity in Appalachia

Cited by 13 publications

References 12 publications

Key Informants' Perspectives Prior to Beginning a Cervical Cancer Study in Ohio Appalachia

Key Informants' Perspectives Prior to Beginning a Cervical Cancer Study in Ohio Appalachia

Fundamentals of Social Identity and Social Justice: Considering Social Identity Within CBPR With Marginalized Populations

Before they were Diamonds: The Intergenerational Migration of Kentucky's Coal Camp Blacks

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