Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

On January 9, 2014, residents across Charleston, West Virginia, awoke to an unusual licorice smell in the air and a similar taste in the public drinking water. That evening residents were informed the tap water in tens of thousands of homes, hundreds of businesses, and dozens of schools and hospitals—the water made available to as many as 300,000 citizens in a nine-county region—had been contaminated with a chemical used for cleaning crushed coal. This book tells a particular set of stories about that chemical spill and its aftermath, an unfolding water crisis that would lead to months, even years, of …

A brief personal and intellectual biography of the late anthropologist, Roy Rappaport.

This chapter explores how community might be reimagined for the benefit of public health as well as to promote incipient social or economic agendas born of progressive citizen action aimed at what is commonly characterized as development or, perhaps, even more broadly as “growth.” Can a city like Huntington, West Virginia, emerge as a positive example of what we might term postindustrial urban regeneration and perhaps even community healing? Can this happen specifically through a grassroots movement now finding local governmental support in a collective attempt to transform this place from one defined primarily by the productive capacity of factories …