This is a qualitative study of women and change in the coalfields and nearby mining areas of Southwest Virginia in the Central Appalachian mountains, a peripheral region in a core country at the end of the twentieth century. Intensive interviews with working-class women in grassroots associations explicate women’s experiences in the intersection of social structures of class, gender, and Appalachian ethnicity. Conditions and positions of marginalization are explored through analysis of women’s lives in the family, through work, and in communities. The study also examines grassroots associations as contexts for empowerment, and how women struggle for development and change. A grounded theory of empowerment as a process of coming to personal autonomy through political community is presented as an alternative to the economism and individualism of conventional women in development analysis. / Ph. D.

In both Outer Dark and Child of God, McCarthy does a masterful job of blending the elements of Appalachian Gothic to present a novel that is darkly suspenseful and grimly thought-provoking. Outer Dark focuses on the complex incestuous relationship between a brother and sister and their interaction with others. The novel follows the two on a journey through the wilderness where they must cope with the unknown qualities of that wilderness, as well as the guilt stemming from their own behaviors. In Child of God, McCarthy explores the grotesque nature of a life lived in isolation and poverty in the mountains. This novel focuses more on an individual descent into the gruesome depths that illustrate the main character’s depravity. In these two novels McCarthy examines the darker side of life in Appalachia, and forces readers to question the purpose and meaning for the characters’ lives and actions.

One of the most prominent traditions associated with the Southern Appalachians is the art of weaving. Extensive research has focused on the history of Appalachian weaving, but there is little on the current weaving community. Today, the region still serves as an axis for weaving, and many practicing weavers, weaving instructors, and learning institutions can be found in Southern Appalachia. The core of this study is the interviews with ten weavers that reside and practice their work in Appalachia. Using concept coding, the transcripts of the interviews led to the development of four major themes that highlight the weavers’ discovery of their weaving passion, what continues to be a source of motivation for weaving, how today’s weavers use weaving as a source of income, and how weaving continues to be deeply connected to Southern Appalachia’s art and craft making traditions.

In his latest collection of writings about the foodways of the Appalachian region, Fred W. Sauceman guides readers through country kitchens and church fellowship halls, across pasture fields and into smokehouses, down rows of vegetable gardens at the peak of the season and alongside ponds resonant with the sounds of a summer night. The scenes and subjects are oftentimes uniquely personal, and they combine to tell a love story, a chronicle of one person's affection for a region and its people, its products, and its places. Traversing Appalachia from an Italian kitchen in Pennsylvania to a soda shop in South Carolina, BUTTERMILK AND BIBLE BURGERS is a tribute to people loyal to the land and proud of their culinary heritage. Sauceman describes the common bond of breaking beans, the dignity of the barbecue pit, the nobility of the black-iron skillet, and the transformative power of a glass of Tennessee buttermilk. Sauceman also shares recipes from a teacher who lived to be 116. He explains Kentucky banana croquettes and Virginia Ju-Ju burgers. He samples trout caviar in the mountains of North Carolina and sorghum on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. From a notebook stained by Nehi, Sauceman calls forth stories of Hungarian immigrants who gather every fall to make cabbage rolls in Virginia and Cubans who converge in Tennessee to roast a pig and to remember. BUTTERMILK AND BIBLE BURGERS is most of all an expression of gratitude for the persistence of the people who feed us. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1031/thumbnail.jpg

[Compilation CD featuring 1950s-era field recordings] Recently recovered recordings of Haywood County, N.C., musicians made nearly 60 years ago – which an Appalachian music expert describes as “the missing link between old-time string music and bluegrass” – are once again seeing the light of day and finding a new audience thanks to Great Smoky Mountains Association. Four years after the release of their Grammy-nominated “Old-Time Smoky Mountain Music,” GSMA producers follow up now with “Carroll Best and the White Oak String Band: Old-time Bluegrass from the Great Smoky Mountains, 1956 and 1959.” The new collection features more than 30 tracks, including such old-time favorites as “Tennessee Wagoner,” “Arkansas Traveler,” “Old Joe Clark,” “Soldier’s Joy,” as well as such modern tunes as “Banjo Boogie” and “Smoky Mountain Melody.” / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1169/thumbnail.jpg

Relocating health behaviors within a political-economic framework, this article utilizes health behavior and health insurance governance perspectives to showcase the complexities of cultural and economic factors (e.g., job lock, wage differentials, social location, and health insurance status) that influence choices in efforts to mitigate the financial burden of health risk. By exploring the financial links to health behaviors that emerged through ethnographic participant observation and semistructured interviews with community and union members of the United Steelworkers and Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union in a metropolitan Central Appalachian community in 2007–8, this article argues for expanding the health behaviors concept to include a broader array of actions individuals and families take to better their health and well-being in the context of neoliberal shifting of risk management to individuals through increased consumer market-based cost-sharing health insurance disincentives. In so doing, this article argues for the importance of social and political-economic context in health behaviors and in evaluating health policy, including the Affordable Care Act.

Book Summary: The Grove Dictionary of American Music, second edition is the largest, most comprehensive reference publication on American Music. Twenty-five years ago, the four volumes of the first edition of the dictionary initiated a great expansion in American music scholarship. This second edition reflects the growth in scholarship the first edition initiated. At eight volumes, it provides greatly expanded coverage, particularly in the areas of popular music, cities and regions, musical theater, opera, concert music, and music technology, as well as the musical traditions of many ethnic and cultural groups.

Purpose of Review: The purpose of this review is to address infection with HIV and hepatitis C in the Appalachian region of the USA and the driving forces underlying this epidemic. We seek to discuss epidemiology of disease and the possible interventions to reduce incidence and burden of disease in this resource-limited area. Recent Findings: The rise of the opioid crisis has fueled a rise in new hepatitis C infection, and a rise in new HIV infection is expected to follow. Injection drug use has directly contributed to the epidemic and continues to remain a risk factor. Men who have sex with men remains a significant risk factor for HIV acquisition as well. Summary: Progress has been made in the battle against HIV and, to a lesser extent, hepatitis C, but much more can be done. Limited data on co-infection with HIV/HCV are currently available for this at-risk region, but it is clear that Appalachia is highly vulnerable to co-infection outbreaks. A multipronged approach that includes advances in assessment of co-infection and education for both patients and clinicians can help to recognize, manage, and ideally prevent these illnesses.

Farmers have traditionally depended on their families or paid employees to cover their extensive labor needs. Today, non-waged labor models are gaining popularity, especially among small, ecologically-oriented farms. Apprenticeships and internships can be a primary form of training for a population of new and beginning farmers, many of whom are entering the field without farming backgrounds. However, many question the sustainability and justness of these arrangements. As a new phenomenon, very little research examines the relationship between non-waged labor models like agricultural apprenticeships and alternative food movements. In this exploratory study, the author surveyed nearly 250 farmers growing for local markets in the Southern Appalachians to better understand their rationales for using waged or non-waged labor, and to explore how those decisions impact the local food movement developing within the region. The author finds that farmers using non-waged labor are smaller, less profitable, and more likely to be new to farming than their wage-paying counterparts, and that they choose to host non-waged laborers for both economic and noneconomic reasons. Ultimately, non-waged labor models create incremental steps towards changing the food system by educating new farmers and food systems advocates, increasing the transparency of agricultural labor practices, and giving small-scale farmers a chance to grow their business and get more products into the local economy. However, the non-wage labor model may not be sustainable in the long run, and it perpetuates injustices, such as the exclusion of those who can't afford to train without pay, and it should evolve as the food system evolves.

Representations of the Appalachia region in literature, art and pop culture have historically shifted between hyperbolic, colorful caricatures to grotesque, sensationalized, black and white photography. This wide spectrum of depictions continually resonates within the North American psyche due to its shared commonality of Appalachia as the cultural “other.” This othering frequently leaves audiences with a kind of relief that this warped representation of backwards, rural poverty is not their own progressive, present-day reality. Countless artists have exploited the region in order to show the impoverished side of rural Appalachia and spin a failed capitalistic way of life into a romanticized, intentional “return to the frontier.” While these representations are often littered with evidence of economic and environmental devastation, audiences are not educated, or otherwise are not provided enough context on how to identity such signs. Some writers have gone so far as to repeatedly depict Appalachians as aggressive and violent in their primitivism, attributing this to their genealogy in relation to the landscape. Through analyzing how a selection of insider and outsider works includes or neglects three primary elements crucial to successful cultural representation: compassion, context and complexity, one can begin to broadly define what many Appalachians feel is lacking from their own narrative within pop culture. Something as simple as the angle of a camera can dramatically affect the way a viewer experiences a photograph and its subject. Furthermore, the chosen narrator of a novel can make the difference for a reader between a compassionate portrayal of a region previously unknown to them, and one that enforces the existing stereotype of Appalachia. This dissertation will begin to broach the subject of responsibility in the context of cultural representation, as well as how individual artistic motivations and decisions can have negative, far-reaching consequences for the Appalachian region.