Summary

This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition “Studio Window: The Prints of Grace Martin Taylor,” curated by Robert Bridges, at the Art Museum of West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia, September 16 to December 15, 2016. The exhibition marked the first time that a complete set of Grace Martin Taylor’s white-line prints have been exhibited. Taylor was born near Morgantown and graduated from WVU before embarking on a career in art. She studied with her cousin, internationally known American modernist Blanche Lazzell, and went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Arthur Carles in the 1920s, and later with prestigious artists such as Hans Hofmann and Emil Bisttram. One of America’s innovative printmakers of the 20th century, Taylor dedicated her life to teaching art in West Virginia for 40 years at what is now the University of Charleston, where she promoted modern art and abstraction.

Contents

Coming soon

Author

Robert Bridges is curator of the Art Museum of West Virginia University. Between 2000 and 2015, Bridges organized more than 80 exhibitions in WVU’s Mesaros Galleries, among them “Ceramic Art from the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute” and two national exhibitions featuring the work of American Modernist Blanche Lazzell. Since the opening of the Art Museum in 2015, his curatorial projects have included “Shepard Fairey: Work Against the Clampdown” and “Paintings and Sculptures by Sally and Peter Saul,” among others. Bridges is co-editor (along with Kristina Olson and Janet Snyder) of Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of An American Modernist (WVU Press, 2004). He received his MFA in printmaking at WVU and previously worked as a curator in the private sector in Chicago.

Kristina Olson is an associate professor of art history at West Virginia University, as well as the associate director of the School of Art & Design. Her research focuses on the intersection of contemporary art and architecture. She is co-editor of Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times: The Revolution Will Be Live (Routledge, 2019).

Reviews

Coming soon

Summary

Blanche Lazzell (1878–1956), a cubist painter known for her white line woodcuts, received a degree from West Virginia University in 1905. She later studied at the Art Students League, as well as in Paris and Provincetown, Massachusetts. As she continued her studies, her work became more and more informed by modernism; however, it was her involvement in Hans Hofmann’s drawing classes in 1937–38 that encouraged Lazzell’s return to abstraction. Published to accompany an exhibition held at West Virginia University, in Morgantown, West Virginia, the catalogue features drawings by Blanche Lazzell with a major essay by Kristina Olson, explaining Hans Hofmann's impact on the artist. The catalogue lists 30 works in the exhibition.

Contents

Coming soon

Author

Robert Bridges is curator of the Art Museum of West Virginia University. Between 2000 and 2015, Bridges organized more than 80 exhibitions in WVU’s Mesaros Galleries, among them “Ceramic Art from the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute” and two national exhibitions featuring the work of American Modernist Blanche Lazzell. Since the opening of the Art Museum in 2015, his curatorial projects have included “Shepard Fairey: Work Against the Clampdown” and “Paintings and Sculptures by Sally and Peter Saul,” among others. Bridges is co-editor (along with Kristina Olson and Janet Snyder) of Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of An American Modernist (WVU Press, 2004). He received his MFA in printmaking at WVU and previously worked as a curator in the private sector in Chicago.

Kristina Olson is an associate professor of art history at West Virginia University, as well as the associate director of the School of Art & Design. Her research focuses on the intersection of contemporary art and architecture. She is co-editor of Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times: The Revolution Will Be Live (Routledge, 2019).

Reviews

Coming soon

Summary

Published with a new preface, this innovative case study from Nova Scotia analyzes the relationship between rural communities and contemporary education. Rather than supporting place-sensitive curricula and establishing networks within community populations, the rural school has too often stood apart from local life, with the generally unintended consequence that many educationally successful rural youth come to see their communities and lifestyles as places to be left behind. They face what Michael Corbett calls a mobility imperative, which, he shows, has been central to contemporary schooling. Learning to Leave argues that if education is to be democratic and serve the purpose of economic, social, and cultural development, then it must adapt and respond to the specificity of its locale, the knowledge practices of the people, and the needs of those who struggle to remain in challenged rural places.

Author

Michael Corbett teaches at Acadia University in Nova Scotia and has studied youth educational decision-making, mobilities and education, the politics of educational assessment, literacies in rural contexts, improvisation and the arts in education, conceptions of space and place, the viability of small rural schools, and wicked policy problems and controversies in education.

Contents

Preface to the 2020 Edition
Foreword
Acknowledgment

Chapter 1
Introduction
Migration and Regional Dependency: The Brain Drain
The Migration Imperative in Rural Education
Challenges to the Migration Imperative in Rural Schooling
Why Would Young People Stay?
Schooling and Migration in Atlantic Canada
Notes

Chapter 2
Reconceptualizing Resistance
Habitus, Discourse and Place
Resistance Theory in the Sociology of Education
Bourdieu’s Logic of Practice
Poststructural Resistance Theory
Resistance and Community
Rural Identity Politics
The Organized Rural Community as a Resistant Site
Conclusion: To Choose and to Move
Notes

Chapter 3
Who Stays, Who Goes and Where
Education and Migration on Digby Neck, 1963–1998
The Economy
Education Levels
Mobility
The Education/Mobility Connection
Summary
Notes

Chapter 4
Parallel Education Systems
The Classes of 1963–1974
Family and Work: An Education for Staying
The Hand on the Shoulder: Socialization for Leaving
Formal Education: Streaming for Leaving
in the 1960s and early 1970s
Learning to Do: The Construction of Intelligence
and Identity in a Coastal Community
They Wanted Me to Go to School: Schooling, Identity and Family
Leaving Home: Education and Occupational Pioneering
I Didn’t Want to End Up
Resisting Displacement
Conclusion
Notes

Chapter 5
The Boom Years
The Classes of 1975–1986
Gender, Work and Schooling
Defining Security: Education, Identity and Work
Family/Class
The Mobile Family
Becoming a Stranger
Conclusion
Notes

Chapter 6
Surviving the Crisis
The Classes of 1987–1998
What Is There For the Young Ones?
Quitting in the 1990s: Finding Something to
Do When There’s Nothing to Do
The New Reserve Army of Labour
Getting Out: Class, Gender and Education
Survival and Family
Back to the Future: Surviving in the New Economy
Resistance
Conclusion: The Mobile Discourse of Schooling
Notes

Chapter 7
Conclusion
Place Matters
Migration, Education and Ambivalence: Mobility Capital
Ambiguity, Mobility and Resistance
Resistances
Rural Schooling and Community
Notes

References
Index

Reviews

“A major research contribution—one that will join a relatively short list of first-rate books aimed at helping the education research community, as well as the general public, understand the convoluted phenomenon known as rural education.”
Journal of Research in Rural Education

“An engrossing, theoretically sophisticated, and important piece of community sociology.”
Rural Sociology

Summary

This interdisciplinary collection of eleven original essays focuses on the environmental impact of transportation, which is, as Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad and Brian C. Black note in their introduction, responsible for 26 percent of global energy use. Approaching mobility not solely as a material, logistical question but as a phenomenon mediated by culture, the book interrogates popular assumptions deeply entangled with energy choices. Rethinking transportation, the contributors argue, necessarily involves fundamental understandings of consumption, freedom, and self.

The essays in Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change cover an eclectic range of subject matter, from the association of bicycles with childhood to the songs of Bruce Springsteen, but are united in a central conviction: “Transport is a considerable part of our culture that is as hard to transform as it is for us to stop using fossil fuels—but we do not have an alternative.”

Contents

Introduction. Carbonization as a Choice: Environmental Ethics, Mobility, and Energy Options
Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad and Brian C. Black

Part I: Mobility and the Environment

1. Using Heritage and Ecological Systems Thinking to Inform Resilient Automobility Design
Barry L. Stiefel

2. Bikes for Children, Cars for Adults: Postwar American Transportation Culture and the Legacy of Moving Images
James Longhurst

3. E-Scooters and the Urban Micromobility Revolution
Matthew C. Swanson

Part II: Car Cultures

4. “Carbolization”: Cars, Carbon Emissions, and the Global Discipline of Automobility
Gordon M. Sayre

5. Hydrocarbon Enslavement and Fantasies of Freedom
Patrick D. Murphy

6. Suicide Machines: Bruce Springsteen, Ballard, and Broken Heroes on a Last Chance Power Drive
David LaRocca

7. Remainders of the Fossil Regime: Automobility Regression in Three Post-Apocalyptic Novels
Brent Ryan Bellamy

Part III: Film, Energy, and Climate Change

8. Intermodal Aesthetics and the Otherwise of Cargo
Megan Hayes and Jeff Diamanti

9. Nature Guarding “Her Treasures” in Oil Comedies: The Case of Local Hero and Fubar: Balls to the Wall
Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann

10. Boom/Bust: Tragic Logistics and Accelerationist Comedy in Petroleum Transport
C. Parker Krieg

11. Trafficking in Petronormativities: At the Intersections of Petrofeminism, Petrocolonialism, and Petrocapitalism
Sheena Wilson

Contributors
Index

Editor

Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of English and American studies at the University of Vienna. She is the author of Docu-Fictions of War: U.S. Interventionism in Film and Literature and coeditor of Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory.

Reviews

“A timely, accessible, and intriguingly interdisciplinary collection. Building upon the important work of energy humanities, which has focused on exposing the links between material systems of fueling and symbolic regimes of values and power, the collection compels the reader—in a performative act of slowing down—to contemplate the most dispersed yet most concrete site of the long twentieth century of accelerationism.”
Anindita Banerjee, Cornell University

Summary

Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century provides a complete exploration of English in Appalachia for a broad audience of scholars and educators. Starting from the premise that just as there is no single Appalachia, there is no single Appalachian dialect, this essay collection brings together wide-ranging perspectives on language variation in the region. Contributors from the fields of linguistics, education, and folklore debunk myths about the dialect’s ancient origins, examine subregional and ethnic differences, and consider the relationships between language and identity—individual and collective—in a variety of settings, including schools. They are attentive to the full range of linguistic expression, from everyday spoken grammar to subversive Dale Earnhardt memes.

A portal to the language scholarship of the last thirty years, Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century translates state-of-the-art research for a nonspecialist audience, while setting the agenda for further study of language in one of America’s most recognized regions.

Contents

Foreword by Donna Christian
Preface

Part I. Linguistic and Regional Boundaries

1. Just What and Where Are Appalachian Englishes?
J. Daniel Hasty

2. Phonological Possibilities in Appalachian Englishes
Paul E. Reed

3. Grammar across Appalachia
Kirk Hazen

Part II. Language in Society

4. Discourse in Appalachia
Allison Burkette

5. Identity and Representation in Appalachia: Perceptions in and of Appalachia, Its People, and Its Languages
Jennifer Cramer

6. Language, Gender, and Sexuality in Appalachia
Christine Mallinson and J. Inscoe

7. Language and Ethnicity in Appalachia
Becky Childs

Part III. Language in the Wider World

8. Redneck Memes as an Appalachian Reclamation of Vernacular Authority, Language, and Identity
Jordan Lovejoy

9. Intersections of Literature and Dialect in Appalachia
Isabelle Shepherd and Kirk Hazen

10. Teachers and Teens Making Sense of Identity, Place, and Language in Appalachian Secondary Schools
Audra Slocum

11. Appalachian Englishes and the College Campus
Stephany Brett Dunstan and Audrey J. Jaeger

Afterword by Walt Wolfram

Contributors
Index

Editor

Kirk Hazen is professor of linguistics at West Virginia University, where he is the founding director of the West Virginia Dialect Project and a Benedum Distinguished Scholar in the Humanities. His research, teaching, and linguistic service are all centered on social and linguistic patterns of language variation. His most recent book is An Introduction to Language, and he is coeditor of Research Methods in Sociolinguistics.

Reviews

“A much-needed, cohesive, and well-written book.”
Mary Kohn, Kansas State University

“A useful guide . . . accessible for both linguists and non-linguists.”
Journal of Appalachian Studies

Summary

The Opioid Epidemic and US Culture brings a new set of perspectives to one of the most pressing contemporary topics in Appalachia and the nation as a whole. A project aimed both at challenging dehumanizing attitudes toward those caught in the opioid epidemic and at protesting the structural forces that have enabled it, this edited volume assembles a multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners to consider the ways that people have mobilized their creativity in response to the crisis. From the documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia to the role of cough syrup in mumble rap, and from a graphic novel’s depiction of addiction to protests against the Sackler family’s art-world philanthropy, the essays here explore the intersections of expressive culture, addiction, and recovery.

Written for an audience of people working on the front lines of the opioid crisis, the book is essential reading for social workers, addiction counselors, halfway house managers, and people with opioid use disorder. It will also appeal to the community of scholars interested in understanding how aesthetics shape our engagement with critical social issues, particularly in the fields of literary and film criticism, museum studies, and ethnomusicology.

Contents

Introduction: The Opioid Crisis and Expressive Culture
Travis D. Stimeling

Part I. On the Outside Looking In: The Opioid Crisis from Without

1. “Something Too Pure / Is Killing Us”: Opioid-Addiction Porn, Endurance, and the Neoliberal Appropriation of Resilience
Jordan Lovejoy

2. “Snort Pills on My Head”: The Visual Rhetoric of Addiction, Abjection, and White Trash in The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia
Christopher Garland

3. The Pill: Aesthetics, Addiction, and Gender in Jennifer Weiner’s All Fall Down
Ashleigh Hardin

4. Prince, Tom Petty, and Pain: Projections of Authenticity in Popular Music
Leigh H. Edwards

5. “Maybe If I’d Stayed”: Appalachian Outmigration and Narratives of Loss in Nate May’s Dust in the Bottomland
Travis D. Stimeling

Part II. If You Lived Here: Representing the Opioid Epidemic from Within

6. Pretty Lil Azzie
Crystal Good

7. The Way the World Is: From Maggie Boylan
Michael Henson

8. Finding Maggie Boylan
Michael Henson

9. You Talkin’ about Me? Turning the Blood of Appalachia’s Opioid Epidemic into Ink
Jacqueline Yahn

10. Remediating the Opioid Crisis in Museums
Ethan Sharp

11. A Hole Is Not a Void: Extraction, Addiction, and Aesthetics
Jonas N. T. Becker

12. Narrative Engagement with the Opioid Epidemic: From Personal Story to Personal Reflection
Amanda M. Caleb and Susan McDonald

13. Recovering from Addiction in Sobriety: Narrating Disability/Mental Illness through the Medium of Comic Art
Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad

14. “Hey, Let’s Have a Very Good Time”: The Opioid Aesthetics of Post-Verbal Rap
Austin T. Richey

Part III. New Day Dawning: Recovery, Sobriety, and Post-Opioid Futures

15. Healing Open Wounds
Chelsea Jack

16. Pain Is One Dance Partner: Move with It
Anne Lloyd Willett

17. Images of Opioid Addiction, Recovery, and Privilege in Mainstream Hip Hop
Paige Zalman

18. The Voices of Hope—A Recovery Community Choir: Redefining Self, Community, and Success
Natalie Shaffer

Contributors
Index

Editor

Travis D. Stimeling is associate professor of musicology at West Virginia University, where he also directs the WVU Bluegrass and Old-Time Bands. His previous books include Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Country Music Scene, The Country Music Reader, and two books with WVU Press: Fifty Cents and a Box Top: The Creative Life of Nashville Session Musician Charlie McCoy and Songwriting in Contemporary West Virginia: Profiles and Reflections.

Reviews

“A wholly unique and timely approach to understanding the ways that opioids have become entangled with the lives of users and of US culture at large, and a needed complement to public health, sociological, and criminological approaches to this particular problem.”
Travis Linnemann, author of Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power
 

Summary

Bluegrass Ambassadors is the first book-length study of the McLain Family Band, which has spread the gospel of bluegrass for more than fifty years. Rooted in bluegrass but also collaborating with classical composers and performing folk, jazz, gospel, and even marches, the band traveled to sixty-two foreign countries in the 1970s under the auspices of the State Department. The band’s verve and joyful approach to its art perfectly suited its ambassadorial role. After retiring as full-time performers, most members of the group became educators, with patriarch Raymond K. McLain’s work at Berea College playing a particularly important role in bringing bluegrass to the higher education curriculum.

Interpreting the band’s diverse repertoire as both a source of its popularity and a reason for its exclusion from the bluegrass pantheon, Paul Jenkins advances subtle arguments about genre, criticism, and audience. Bluegrass Ambassadors analyzes the McLains’ compositions, recordings, and performances, and features a complete discography.

Contents

Family Tree
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Beginnings

2. Berea and Beyond

3. All in the Family

4. Going Classical

5. In the Studio

6. Rosemary’s Songs

7. On the Road

8. “My Name’s Music”

9. In the Classroom: The McLains as Educators

10. Celebrating Life and Fifty Years Together

Appendix A: Interpretations
Appendix B: Solo Recordings
Chronology
Discography
Notes
Bibliography              

Author

Paul O. Jenkins is the university librarian at Franklin Pierce University. He has written numerous articles on old-time and bluegrass music and is the author of Richard Dyer-Bennet: The Last Minstrel and Teaching the Beatles.

Reviews

“From humble beginnings in a small Appalachian hamlet to symphony stages around the world, the McLain Family Band has been a torchbearer for the music of America’s front porch. This is a story of a musical legacy, of passion and talent, of kind- ness and art wrapped in the magic of a family bond.”
Michael Johnathon, folk singer

“An excellent effort brimming with infectious joy.”
Library Journal

Summary

In 1921 Blair Mountain in southern West Virginia was the site of the country’s bloodiest armed insurrection since the Civil War, a battle pitting miners led by Frank Keeney against agents of the coal barons intent on quashing organized labor. It was the largest labor uprising in US history. Ninety years later, the site became embroiled in a second struggle, as activists came together to fight the coal industry, state government, and the military-industrial complex in a successful effort to save the battlefield—sometimes dubbed “labor’s Gettysburg”—from destruction by mountaintop removal mining.

The Road to Blair Mountain is the moving and sometimes harrowing story of Charles Keeney’s fight to save this irreplaceable landscape. Beginning in 2011, Keeney—a historian and great-grandson of Frank Keeney—led a nine-year legal battle to secure the site’s placement on the National Register of Historic Places. His book tells a David-and-Goliath tale worthy of its own place in West Virginia history. A success story for historic preservation and environmentalism, it serves as an example of how rural, grassroots organizations can defeat the fossil fuel industry.

Contents

Preface

1. Fighting for a Battlefield

2. Marching into Blair

3. Camp Branch

4. The Northwest Flank

5. Identity Reclamation

6. The Long Road

Epilogue: Appalachian Anthropocene

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Notes

Index  

Author

Charles B. Keeney is an assistant professor of history at Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College. The author of two books, he served as president of Friends of Blair Mountain and was a founding member of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.

Reviews

“Chuck Keeney takes over where his great-grandfather left off a century ago—in a no-holds-barred fight against King Coal and its pursuit of profits over people. Keeney delivers a riveting and propulsive story about a nine-year battle to save sacred ground that was the site of the largest labor uprising in American history. You’ll find yourself rooting for Keeney from beginning to end. He unveils a powerful playbook on successful activism that will inspire countless others for generations to come.”
Eric Eyre, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic

“Fascinating. . . . Suspenseful to the very end.”
Daily Yonder

“This book connects to work on twentieth-century labor history, but it is more than that. It is an insider’s thoughts on regional identity and activism as well as a reassessment of how people see Appalachia in the popular mind. When Charles Keeney speaks directly to the reader and offers advice, it resonates in a powerful and present way.”
Steven E. Nash, East Tennessee State University

“Keeney brings a lifetime of scholarship, family relations, and activism to this twenty-first-century chapter of the epic and ongoing saga of Blair Mountain.”
Catherine Venable Moore, president, West Virginia Mine Wars Museum

“In total, The Road to Blair Mountain articulates a thoughtful alternative vision for Appalachia’s future—one that supports its heritage of coal mining and labor history and also seeks a more sustainable, diverse, and decentralized economy.”
Foreword Reviews

Summary

Going back to her ancestral homeland, a Greek American girl discovers she is a lesbian in love with God, so her questions about home and belonging will not be easily answered.

This Way Back dramatizes a childhood split between Queens, New York, and Cyprus, an island nation with a long colonial history and a culture to which Joanna Eleftheriou could never quite adjust. The book avows a Greek-Cypriot- American lesbian’s existence by documenting its scenes: reenacting an 1829 mass suicide by jumping off a school stage onto gym mats at St. Nicholas, harvesting carobs on ancestral land, purchasing UNESCO-protected lace, marching in the island’s first gay pride parade, visiting Cyprus’s occupied north against a dying father’s wish, and pruning geraniums, cypress trees, and jasmine after her father grew too weak to lift the shears. While the author’s life binds the essays in This Way Back into what reads like a memoir, the book questions memoir’s conventional boundaries between the individual and her community, and between political and personal loss, the human and the environment, and the living and the dead.

Contents

The Rope of Desires
Of Acacia and Maple
Your Schedule Depends on the Sky
The Actress Who Isn’t Acting
She and I
Ithacas
The Temple of Zeus
The Other Side
Wild Honey, Locust Beans
Unsent Letter to My Father
Shopping for Story
Dancing Greek
Out
Cyprus Pride
Inheritance Law
Without Goodbyes
Epilogue: Moonlight Elegy
Acknowledgments
Notes

Author

Joanna Eleftheriou is an assistant professor of English at Christopher Newport University. A contributing editor at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, she grew up in New York and Cyprus and now lives in Virginia. Her essays, short stories, and translations have been widely published.

Reviews

“Intimate and a touch mournful, most powerfully so when the author writes about her sexuality. . . . These essays reveal an impassioned and hard-fought sense of self and place.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The essays entice every sense. . . . Heartfelt and heartrending.”
Foreword Reviews

“Joanna Eleftheriou’s collection This Way Back offers a series of essays that both stand alone and form a larger narrative about immigration, bicultural identity, sexual orientation, and the pull of a landscape. These lovely and moving essays are nostalgic, complex, and thoughtful, with sentences you will underline and return to and that will sear you with their beauty.”
Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System