Bøger udgivet af West Virginia University Press

This collection brings together nearly three decades of research on the African American experience, class, and race relations in the Appalachian coal industry. It shows how, with deep roots in the antebellum era of chattel slavery, West Virginia's Black working class gradually picked up steam during the emancipation years following the Civil War and dramatically expanded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.From there, African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry highlights the decline of the region's Black industrial proletariat under the impact of rapid technological, social, and political changes following World War II. It underscores how all miners suffered unemployment and outmigration from the region as global transformations took their toll on the coal industry, but emphasizes the disproportionately painful impact of declining bituminous coal production on African American workers, their families, and their communities. Joe Trotter not only reiterates the contributions of proletarianization to our knowledge of US labor and working-class history but also draws attention to the gender limits of studies of Black life that focus on class formation, while calling for new transnational perspectives on the subject. Equally important, this volume illuminates the intellectual journey of a noted labor historian with deep family roots in the southern Appalachian coalfields.

Part nature guide, part self-help column, and all love letter to the more-than-human world, Utter, Earth is an exercise in wonder. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach. A light, literary take on an animal book for grown-ups, a tongue-in-cheek self-help column with lessons drawn from nature, a sort of hitchhiker's guide to the more-than-human world--Isaac Yuen's Utter, Earth is a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet's riotous wonders. In a time of dirges and elegies for the natural world, Utter, Earth features odes to sloths, tributes to trilobites, and ringing endorsements for lichen. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach, each essay of this one-of-a-kind collection combines joyous language, whimsical tangents, and scientific findings to remind us of and reconnect us with those to whom we are inextricably bound. Highlighting life that once was, still is, and all that we stand to lose, this living and lively mini encyclopedia (complete with glossary) shines the spotlight on the motley, fantastical, and astonishing denizens with whom we share this planet.

Brings together feminist and geographical approaches to the gendered dimensions of various types of infrastructure across the globe. The first book to take a feminist geographical approach to infrastructure, Gendered Infrastructures delves into the complex relationships between identity, social relations, and infrastructure. By drawing on feminist scholarship to enable new frameworks for critical study, this edited volume explores the gendered nature of infrastructures as diverse as Senegal's waste disposal, Vietnam's cement industry, and Lilongwe's water kiosks. The chapters consider how infrastructural assemblages rework and shape gendered relations, identities, and meanings across space, while tracing the intersectionality of relations and uneven geographies that surround infrastructure. Ultimately, the contributors show how gender is always present in the quotidian building blocks that organize the socio-material world and daily life. Edited by Yaffa Truelove and Anu Sabhlok, and the third book in Amy Trauger and Jennifer Fluri's Gender, Feminism, and Geography series, the original essays in Gendered Infrastructures respond to and build upon a "new infrastructural turn in critical scholarship"--one that has helped enliven studies of identity across scale. The volume is relevant to geographers, anthropologists, architects, sociologists, urban researchers, and other interdisciplinary scholars interested in the gendered and social dimensions of infrastructure.

Hell's Not Far Off is a grounded, politically engaged study of the Appalachian journalist and political critic Bruce Crawford, a scourge of coal and railway interests. Crawford fought injustices wherever he saw them at major risk to his own life and became an early interpreter of Appalachian labor history. His writings and actions from the 1920s to the 1960s helped shape southwest Virginia and West Virginia. Through Crawford's Weekly, a newspaper active from 1920 to 1935, Crawford challenged the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs, and the private police forces of coal barons. The wounds received for these efforts were the closing of his paper and a bullet to his leg during a Harlan County strike in the 1930s. In his work after journalism, he led the West Virginia branch of the Federal Writers' Project during the political standoff over the contents of the state's official guidebook. In Hell's Not Far Off, Josh Howard resurrects strands of a radical tradition centered especially on matters of labor, environment, and race, drawing attention to that tradition's ongoing salience: "Present-day Appalachia's fights were [Crawford's], and his fights are still ours."

"Utterly captivating and resonant." --Chicago Review of Books "Gorgeously told." --Philadelphia Inquirer "Resonant. . . . Engagingly delivered, candid reflections on heritage and identity." --Kirkus Reviews The In-Betweens tells the story of a biracial boy becoming a man, all the while trying to find himself, trying to come to terms with his white family, and trying to find his place in American society. A rich narrative in the tradition of Justin Torres's We the Animals and Bryan Washington's Memorial, Davon Loeb's memoir is relevant to the country's current climate and is part of the necessary rewrite of the nation's narrative and identity. The son of a Black mother with deep family roots in Alabama and a white Jewish man from Long Island, Loeb grows up in a Black family in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey as one of the few nonwhite children in their suburban neighborhood. Despite his many and ongoing efforts to fit in, Loeb acutely feels his difference--he is singled out in class during Black History Month; his hair doesn't conform to the latest fad; coaches and peers assume he is a talented athlete and dancer; and on the field trip to the Holocaust Museum, he is the Black Jew. But all is not struggle. In lyrical vignettes, Loeb vibrantly depicts the freedom, joys, and wonder of childhood; the awkwardness of teen years, first jobs, first passions. Loeb tells an individual story universally, and readers, regardless of subjectivity and relation, will see themselves throughout The In-Betweens.

"A celebration of Black family life that will make you laugh and cry in equal measure." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)​ "The collection will reshape what you think about the region and the people that inhabit it." --Debutiful "Surprising and revelatory. . . . I love this book." --Stephanie Powell Watts, author of No One Is Coming to Save Us "This book has staying power." --Crystal Wilkinson, author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts Original stories of Black family life in Louisville, Kentucky, for readers of Dantiel Moniz (Milk Blood Heat) and Kai Harris (What the Fireflies Knew). The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity, following JayLynn, along with her cousins Zaria and Angel, as they come of age struggling against their mothers' drug addictions. JayLynn heads to college intent on gaining distance from her depressed mother, only to learn that her mother's illness has reached a terrifying peak. She fears the chaos and instability of her extended family will prove too much for her boyfriend, whose idyllic family feels worlds, not miles, apart from her own. When bats invade Zaria's new home, she is forced to determine how much she is willing to sacrifice to be a good mother. Angel rebels on Derby night, risking her safety to connect with her absent mother and the wild ways that consumed her. Mama Said separates from stereotypes of Black families, presenting instead the joy, humor, and love that coexist with the trauma of drug abuse within communities. Kristen Gentry's stories showcase the wide-reaching repercussions of addiction and the ties that forever bind daughters to their mothers, flaws and all.

A heartrending and engrossing memoir that challenges narratives of racial progress and postracial America. "Every so often, a book comes along that changes the way we see, speak, and think about the world. Shattered is one of those books." --Frank B. Wilderson III, author of Afropessimism and Incognegro From a distance, Matthieu Chapman's life and accomplishments serve as an example of racial progress in America: the first in his family to go to college, he earns two master's degrees and a doctorate and then becomes a professor of theater. Despite his personal and academic success, however, the specter of antiblackness continues to haunt his every moment and interaction. Told through fragments, facets, shards, slivers, splinters, and absences, Shattered places Chapman's own story in dialogue with US history and structural analysis of race to relay the experience of being very alive in a demonstrably antiblack society--laying bare the impact of the American way on black bodies, black psyches, and black lives. From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the offices of higher education, from a Loyal White Knights flyer on his windshield to a play with black students written by a black playwright, Chapman's life story embodies the resistance that occurs, the shattering, collapsing, and reconfiguring of being that happens in the collisions between conceptions of blackness. Shattered is a heartrending and thought-provoking challenge to narratives of racial progress and postracial America--an important reminder that systemic antiblack racism affects every black person regardless of what they achieve in spite of it.

Told through alternating perspectives, God of River Mud chronicles the lives of Berna Minor, her husband, their four children, and Berna's secret lover. To escape a life of poverty and abuse, Berna Cannaday marries Zechariah Minor, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and commits herself to his faith, trying to make it her own. After Zechariah takes a church beside the Elk River in rural Clay, West Virginia, Berna falls in love with someone from their congregation--Jordan, a woman who has known since childhood that he was meant to be a man. Berna keeps her secret hidden as she struggles to be the wife and mother she believes God wants her to be. Berna and Zechariah's children struggle as well, trying to reconcile the theology they are taught at home with the fast-changing world around them. And Jordan struggles to find a community and a life that allow him both to be safely and fully himself, as Jay, and to be loved for who he is. As the decades and stories unfold, traditional evangelical Bible culture and the values of rural Appalachia clash against innate desires, LGBTQ identity, and gender orientation. Sympathies develop--sometimes unexpectedly--as the characters begin to reconcile their faith and their love. God of River Mud delves into the quandary of those marginalized and dehumanized within a religious patriarchy and grapples with the universal issues of identity, faith, love, and belonging.

A collection of creative writing and art about COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic by people from vulnerable populations. Bringing together artwork, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Essential Voices shares the perspectives of people from vulnerable populations as they were affected by COVID-19 in 2020, before the release of the vaccine. The pieces in this volume represent a range of writers and artists, some from international locations, whose work may be less likely to be seen because of race, ethnicity, or current legal status. Contributors include individuals who identify as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, or seniors; those who are immunocompromised or undocumented; those working in medicine, food service, factories, and sanitation; and parents who were unable to work from home, along with individuals who were being held in correctional facilities or facing mental health concerns. This multigenre collection preserves the history of the pandemic by documenting and publishing these essential voices. Essential Voices will be of interest to readers who want to consider the diverse lived experiences of people during the pandemic when outcomes were most uncertain. It will also be useful for teachers, students, activists, and policy makers in a variety of settings, including government, hospitals, prisons, homeless shelters, colleges, art schools, and secondary schools.

Environment, craft, and meaning in the work of Appalachian instrument makers. How can the craft of musical instrument making help reconnect people to place and reenchant work in Appalachia? How does the sonic search for musical tone change relationships with trees and forests? Following three craftspeople in the mountain forests of Appalachia through their processes of making instruments, Finding the Singing Spruce considers the meanings of work, place, and creative expression in drawing music from wood. Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth explores the complexities and contradictions of instrument-making labor, which is deeply rooted in mountain forests and expressive traditions but also engaged with global processes of production and consumption. Using historical narratives and sensory ethnography, among other approaches, he finds that the craft of lutherie speaks to the past, present, and future of the region's work and nature.

An adaptation of Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative published for Black children in 1829, now given new life in a major scholarly edition. In 1829, Samuel Wood and Sons, a New York publisher of children's literature, printed and sold the Quaker Abigail Field Mott's Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano. Mott adapted Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, a bestselling autobiography first published in London in 1789, for Black children studying at New York African Free Schools, one of the first educational systems to teach individuals of African descent in the United States. By reissuing Mott's neglected adaptation with contextualizing scholarly apparatus, Eric D. Lamore disrupts the editorial tradition of selecting a London edition of Equiano's Interesting Narrative, and positions Equiano in the United States instead of Great Britain. Lamore's volume contains Mott's children's book, which includes a series of illustrations, in a facsimile edition; instructive notes on Life and Adventures; a provocative essay on the adaptation; and selections from relevant texts on the New York African Free Schools and other related topics. With its focus on the intersections of early Black Atlantic and American studies, children's literature, history of education, life writing, and book history, this edition offers a fresh take on Equiano and his autobiography for a variety of twenty-first-century audiences.

The improbable and powerful true story of a single mother with prosthetics for both legs who travels the globe with her young daughter in a Land Rover. "A harrowing memoir. . . . Readers may not want to follow in [Shinn's] footsteps, but they will never be bored with her as a companion." ¿--Kirkus Reviews The Wounds That Bind Us is the improbable true story of Kelley Shinn, an orphan at birth who loses her legs at the age of sixteen to a rare bacterial pathogen. She becomes an avid off-road racer and, as a single mother, attempts to drive around the globe in a Land Rover with her three-year-old daughter in tow to bring light to the plight of land mine survivors. With unflinching honesty, exceptional lyricism, and biting humor, Shinn ("that's two Ns and no shins") takes readers on a wild journey--literal and emotional--filled with striking characters and landscapes, heartbreaks, and hard-won insights, ultimately arriving at a place of profound redemption. Told with the energy and intensity of the adventure story it is, this terrifically rich and nuanced examination of a life is also a careful meditation on renewal--a remapping of the world. Guided by the narrator's keen introspection and her ability to look resolutely at harrowing sorrows and still find hope, joy, and meaning, The Wounds That Bind Us will resonate deeply, long after the last page.

Scholarly and activist perspectives on identities often overlooked in the study of geography: youth and age. Young people will bear the brunt of the impacts of present and emerging crises occurring at all scales, from the national to the global. This volume brings together scholars and activists from various backgrounds to analyze youth interactions with law and politics, focusing specifically on the US legal landscape. It uses the lens of youth geographies to consider how legal and political systems shape our spaces, and provides leading-edge perspectives through case studies of child labor, compulsory education, asylum claims, criminalization of youth, youth activism, and more. Of special interest in this volume is the tension between young people as both objects of law and policy and creative agents of change. Despite being directly affected by law and policy, young people are denied access to many legally sanctioned paths to shape them. Yet youth find ways to work within and mold the social, political, and legal spheres and set the stage for alternative futures.

One of the first book-length considerations of the Appalachian writer Robert Morgan. One of the first book-length studies of Robert Morgan, Community across Time considers the Appalachian writer's explorations of memory, family history, and landscape. It provides a study of all of Morgan's fiction to date, as well as a chapter on his poetry and some reference, where appropriate, to his nonfiction. Rebecca Godwin examines the family history that informs much of this body of work, offering an extended biographical essay that ties characters and plot details to Morgan's ancestors' lives and to his own experiences growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Religious rifts, economic hardships, class conflicts, the place of women and Indigenous peoples, and the failure of humans to recognize the divinity of the natural world are among the motifs centering Morgan's writing. Community across Time explores those themes as it looks to Morgan's relationship to the Appalachian South.

Historians investigate the relationships between film, culture, and energy. American Energy Cinema explores how Hollywood movies have portrayed energy from the early film era to the present. Looking at classics like Giant, Silkwood, There Will Be Blood, and Matewan, and at quirkier fare like A Is for Atom and Convoy, it argues that films have both reflected existing beliefs and conjured new visions for Americans about the role of energy in their lives and their history. The essays in this collection show how film provides a unique and informative lens to understand perceptions of energy production, consumption, and infrastructure networks. By placing films that prominently feature energy within historical context and analyzing them as historical objects, the contributing authors demonstrate how energy systems of all kinds are both integral to the daily life of Americans and inextricable from larger societal changes and global politics.

How teachers can help combat higher education's mental health crisis. Mental health challenges on college campuses were a huge problem before COVID-19, and now they are even more pronounced. But while much has been written about higher education's mental health crisis, very little research focuses on the role played by those on campus whose influence on student well-being may well be greatest: teachers. Drawing from interviews with students and the scholarship of teaching and learning, this book helps correct the oversight, examining how faculty can--instead of adding to their own significant workloads or duplicating counselors' efforts--combat student stress through adjustments to the work they already do as teachers. Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom provides practical tips that reduce unnecessary discouragement. It demonstrates how small improvements in teaching can have great impacts in the lives of students with mental health challenges, while simultaneously boosting learning for all students.

A more-than-human approach to planetary survival, from a leading environmental humanist. Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene is a tour de force. With transdisciplinarity and theoretical lucidity, it rethinks the Anthropocene from a material ecocritical perspective, envisioning innovative modes of knowledge for deeper understandings of Anthropocene ecologies. Focusing on nonhuman agencies, Serpil Oppermann shows in fascinating detail how to better imagine an ecological future on our storied planet that has suffered enormously from an anthropocentric mindset.

As our economic and natural systems continue on their collision course, Bruce Jennings asks whether we have the political capacity to avoid large-scale environmental disaster. Can liberal democracy, he wonders, respond in time to ecological challenges that require dramatic changes in the way we approach the natural world? Must a more effective governance be less democratic and more autocratic? Or can a new form of grassroots ecological democracy save us from ourselves and the false promises of material consumption run amok?Ecological Governance is an ethicist's reckoning with how our political culture, broadly construed, must change in response to climate change. Jennings argues that during the Anthropocene era a social contract of consumption has been forged. Under it people have given political and economic control to elites in exchange for the promise of economic growth. In a new political economy of the future, the terms of the consumptive contract cannot be met without severe ecological damage. We will need a new guiding vision and collective aim, a new social contract of ecological trusteeship and responsibility.

Almanac for the Anthropocene collects original voices from across the solarpunk movement, which positions ingenuity, generativity, and community as beacons of resistance to the hopelessness often inspired by the climate crisis. To point toward practical implementation of the movement's ideas, it gathers usable blueprints that bring together theory and practice. The result is a collection of interviews, recipes, exercises, DIY instructions, and more--all of it amounting to a call to create hope through action.Inspired by a commitment to the idea that there can be no environmental justice without decolonial and racial justice, Almanac for the Anthropocene unites in a single volume both academic and practical responses to environmental crisis.

One of the first new interpretations of West Virginia's origins in over a century--and one that corrects previous histories' tendency to minimize support for slavery in the state's founding. Every history of West Virginia's creation in 1863 explains the event in similar ways: at the start of the Civil War, political, social, cultural, and economic differences with eastern Virginia motivated the northwestern counties to resist secession from the Union and seek their independence from the rest of the state. In The Fifth Border State, Scott A. MacKenzie offers the first new interpretation of the topic in over a century--one that corrects earlier histories' tendency to minimize support for slavery in the state's founding.Employing previously unused sources and reexamining existing ones, MacKenzie argues that West Virginia experienced the Civil War in the same ways as the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Like these northernmost slave states, northwestern Virginia supported the institution of slavery out of proportion to the actual presence of enslavement there. The people who became West Virginians built a new state first to protect slavery, but radical Unionists and escaping slaves forced emancipation on the statehood movement. MacKenzie shows how conservatives and radicals clashed over Black freedom, correcting many myths about West Virginia's origins and making The Fifth Border State an important addition to the literature in Appalachian and Civil War history.