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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
We Can Still Feed Ourselves: Food Sovereignty, Aid, Sickness, And Health In Eastern Kentucky, Annie Koempel
We Can Still Feed Ourselves: Food Sovereignty, Aid, Sickness, And Health In Eastern Kentucky, Annie Koempel
Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology
Over forty percent of eastern Kentucky residents are classified as obese. From a biomedical perspective, obesity is linked to a range of chronic diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure and is caused by particular lifestyle behaviors that lead to an increase in calorie consumption and decrease in calorie expenditure. However, these links – individual behavior leads to obesity which leads to chronic disease - do not take into account a wide range of personal, social, environmental, political, and economic conditions. In addition to the assumptions of what it means to become and be obese, Kentucky is regularly …
‘I Went To The One Game In Town’: Obstetric And Maternity Unit Closures, Dwindling Birth Choices, And Resilience In Rural Appalachia, Sia Beasley
Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology
Obstetric and maternity health services are being rapidly eliminated in the rural United States, making maternal care more difficult to access and causing negative birth outcomes. Service closures have a magnified impact in Appalachia due to histories of systemic regional and state policy practices which devalue the lives of people living rural areas, local economic marginalization, geographic barriers, and insufficient health infrastructures. This research investigates how women living in rural Appalachia navigate pregnancy and birth amidst constant care closures. The Sunflower Mountain Region is a seven-county area in rural Southern Appalachia. The region has experienced ongoing obstetric closures over the …
Producing Possibilities: Envisioning And Mediating Youth, Identities, And Futures In Central Appalachia, Tammy Lynn Clemons
Producing Possibilities: Envisioning And Mediating Youth, Identities, And Futures In Central Appalachia, Tammy Lynn Clemons
Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology
This dissertation, based on anthropological research between 2015 and 2020, focuses on young people in different yet interconnected social contexts in Central Appalachia and how they envision, construct, and act upon possibilities for themselves and the region through multimodal cultural production processes like visual art, performance, and multisensory media. The research question focusing this project was: How do the social contexts of young Appalachians’ engagement in media consumption and production practices shape the possibilities they envision for themselves, others, and their region? I found that the specific contexts were less important than the interconnected mentoring conversations across sites and generations …
The Mothman And Other Strange Tales: Shaping Queer Appalachia Through Folkloric Discourse In Online Social Media Communities, Brenton Watts
The Mothman And Other Strange Tales: Shaping Queer Appalachia Through Folkloric Discourse In Online Social Media Communities, Brenton Watts
Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics
Little work has been conducted on the intersections of queer and Appalachian identities, in part because these two identities are viewed as incompatible (Mann 2016). This study uses a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach to examine the Instagram posts of the Queer Appalachia Project, which represent a substantial body of discourse created by and for queer Appalachians. Of specific interest to this analysis are those posts which employ folkloric figures, such as West Virginia’s Mothman, to do identity work that is queer, Appalachian, and queer-Appalachian. Often, this act is accomplished through juxtaposition with Appalachian imagery and the reclamation of homophobic …
Finding The Singing Spruce: Craft Labor, Global Forests, And Musical Instrument Makers In Appalachia, Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth
Finding The Singing Spruce: Craft Labor, Global Forests, And Musical Instrument Makers In Appalachia, Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth
Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology
Musical instrument makers in the state of West Virginia in the United States pursue “singing,” lively instruments that capture ideals of musical tone and “re-enchant” their work and lives through relationships with craft materials and the forest landscape. Suitable tonewoods that grow in the region, such as red spruce (Picea rubens), intersect with makers’ desires to craft instruments in the style of famed makers such as the C.F. Martin Company and the Gibson Company as well as provide instruments imbued with a sense of place. While the demand for and symbolic import of instruments made with local wood …
Unending Mazes: Gendered Inequalities, Drug Use, And State Interventions In Rural Appalachia, Lesly-Marie Buer
Unending Mazes: Gendered Inequalities, Drug Use, And State Interventions In Rural Appalachia, Lesly-Marie Buer
Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology
Prescription opioids are associated with rising rates of overdose deaths and hepatitis C and HIV infection in the US, including in rural Central Appalachia. Yet there is a dearth of published ethnographic research examining rural opioid use. The aim of this dissertation is to document the gendered inequalities that situate women’s encounters with substance abuse treatment as well as additional state interventions targeted at women who use drugs. These results are based on ethnographic fieldwork completed from 2013 to 2016 and centered around one county seat in rural Central Appalachia. Data are ascertained through semi-structured interviews with women who have …
Beyond The Coal Divide: The Cultural Politics Of Natural Resource Extraction In Central Appalachia, Julie A. Shepherd-Powell
Beyond The Coal Divide: The Cultural Politics Of Natural Resource Extraction In Central Appalachia, Julie A. Shepherd-Powell
Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology
During the last several years far southwest Virginia, like elsewhere in the central Appalachian region, has faced a decline in all coal mining activity and a subsequent loss of coal mining jobs, meaning that local economies are suffering and the unemployment line is long. In addition, this area continues to face environmental pollution from surface coal mines that are still in operation or have not been reclaimed. Drawing upon anthropological literature on natural resource extraction and economic and environmental inequality, this dissertation highlights the lives of members of a local grassroots environmental organization, as well as other local residents, in …
Global Transformations, Local Activism: “New” Unionism’S Engagement With Economic And Health Care Transformation In Urban Central Appalachia, Rebecca Adkins Fletcher
Global Transformations, Local Activism: “New” Unionism’S Engagement With Economic And Health Care Transformation In Urban Central Appalachia, Rebecca Adkins Fletcher
University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations
It has long been argued that the organization of the U.S. health care system is shaped by the struggles between capital and labor, and this relationship is of increasing significance today. Transformations from an industrial to a service economy, rising insurance costs, neoliberal social policies, and decreased labor union power have increased the number of Americans with reduced access to health care, especially for service workers and women. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of how workers in two leading unions in the “new” unionism movement, the Retail, Wholesale, and Distribution Service Union (RWDSU) and the United Steelworkers (USW) in …