UK COURSES RELATED TO APPALACHIAN STUDIES, SPRING AND SUMMER 2012
SPRING 2012
Undergraduate
APP 200 Introduction to Appalachian Studies. Instructor: Dwight Billings, TA: Catherine Herdman. Meetings & Times: Lectures on MW 2:00-2:50 p.m. with various Friday discussion sections (see Course Catalog) This course is a multidisciplinary introduction to Appalachian culture, history, and society. It will examine how and why the central and southern Appalachian Mountains came to be viewed as a distinct region, “Appalachia,” and it will examine Appalachia's place in American life. We will encounter the region's rich traditions of music and literature; its rural social life including kinship and neighborhood institutions; coal mining history, community patterns, and labor struggles; gender; the experiences of Native Americans, African Americans, and Eastern Europeans in Appalachia; inequality and poverty; community politics and grassroots struggles; and current environmental issues including mountaintop removal coal mining.
APP 300 Energy in Appalachia. Instructor: Jenrose Fitzgerald. Meets: TR. Time: 3:30-4:45 p.m. This course will critically examine diverse representations of Appalachia’s energy economy. Readings include a range of perspectives on the social, environmental, and economic implications of coal in the region, as well as on the potential of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and other alternatives for diversifying the region’s energy portfolio in the 21st century. A central focus of the course will be the development of skills to help students critically analyze how energy issues in Appalachia are framed by differently positioned players, including journalists, scientists, engineers, social scientists, industry representatives, and environmental and social justice groups. The first half of the course will examine a range of perspectives on the coal industry and its impacts on Appalachian communities, and the second half of the course will focus on strategies for shaping the region’s energy future.
GWS 301-001 Crossroads of Gender, Class, and Race: Trashy Literature. Instructor: Carol Mason. Meets: TR. Time: 2:00-3:15 p.m. Have you ever been told, “Don’t read that trash”!? Have you ever heard someone being called “white trash”? This is a course that explores the cultural and political implications of such exclamations. We will read literature by and about people who are insensitively called white trash. A term we usually take for granted as a mean derision, “white trash” will serve as an analytical category as we read fiction exploring what it means to be working-class, poor, and white in twentieth-century America. We will contextualize the fiction in theories of class, gender, sex, and racialization, specifically the critical study of whiteness, and in regional history, including that of Appalachia.
ANT 352:003 North American Cultures. Instructor: Mary Anglin. Meets: TR. Time: 3:30-4:45 p.m. This course uses readings, films, and music to explore the plurality of peoples and cultures in North America—with particular attention to the US. We will look at youth cultures as sites of creativity and resistance, examine perennial problems in social equality, consider the similarities and differences between urban and rural ways of life, and explore environmental concerns as an integral part of making and sustaining culture. The goals of the course include gaining appreciation for the common humanity and uniqueness of cultures in North America, gaining awareness of and sensitivity toward stereotypes and ethnocentrism, and understanding the distinctions between “race,” ethnicity, and racism. A number of the course readings are specifically Appalachia-focused.
APP 399 Appalachian Resource Sustainability Practicum. Instructor: Ann Kingsolver. Meets: Spring Break 2012. Sign up for one hour of APP 399 with Ann Kingsolver to enroll in this spring break service-learning course in Appalachian Kentucky. The entire course (1 credit hour, pass/fail) will be completed from March 11 to March 18 at the Robinson Forest facilities, which are part of UK’s Robinson Center for Appalachian Resource Sustainability (http://www2.ca.uky.edu/rcars/) near Jackson, Kentucky. Students will learn about the history and future of natural resource use in the region including forestry, mining, and agriculture, with hands-on opportunities to work in a community garden, learn water quality testing techniques, and plan and carry out a small land reclamation project with an organization of young people in Magoffin County working toward sustainable livelihoods in the region. There will be interdisciplinary faculty participation from UK as well as opportunities to learn from discussions and activities with community members. Transportation, lodging, and meals will be available to the group as part of the course; each student’s individual share of the expenses for lodging and meals will be capped at no more than $200 for the week.
ENG 482 Appalachian Literature. Instructor: Erik Reece. Meets: TR. Time: 12:30-1:45 p.m. In this course, we will examine the very rich literature —fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film and music — that has come from the mountains of Appalachia. While the region of Appalachia stretches from Alabama to New York State, our emphasis will be on the literature of central Appalachia — mainly the work of writers from Kentucky and West Virginia.
Undergraduate/Graduate
A&S 500 Special Topics: Global Appalachia. Instructor: Ann Kingsolver. Meets: TR. Time: 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. In this course, we will examine the ways in which Appalachia has always had strong global connections, environmentally, economically, and culturally. We will critique isolationist discourse that has masked the shared concerns of those in Appalachia with other global regions that have been viewed as low-wage labor pools for transnational extractive industries, for example, and that have also contributed to collective knowledge about sustainable resource use and social capital. Appalachia’s global dimensions will be examined both historically and comparatively via topics ranging from local production of global commodities to migration, identity, changing land ownership, and community analyses and responses to the many processes discussed as globalization. The readings will include books by bell hooks, Roger Moody, Vandana Shiva, Eve Weinbaum, and other authors; required work will be different for undergraduate and graduate students.
GEO 509 GIS Workshop. Instructor: Matthew Wilson. Meets: TR. Time: 12:30-1:45 p.m. Geographic information technologies continue to drive the representation and management of complex as well as everyday spatial information. As a result, increasing numbers of for-profit and non-profit organizations have recognized the need to transform their information into a spatial format. The demand for collaborative and participatory skills in the use of these mapping tools has, of course, been furthered by this general trend. Therefore, the goal for this course is that each student will become an independent and effective GIS user while developing their collaborative skills in the use of GIS for spatial analysis and representation. To meet this goal, this course follows a participatory workshop model, drawing on Elwood (2009) -- an intensive, hands-on experience in which student teams use GIS in collaboration with community partners. These partnerships will involve students in a full range of collaborative GIS: working with team members and project partners to identify project goals, acquiring and preparing spatial data for GIS analyses, communicating with clients to assess progress, managing spatial data, and producing necessary maps and analyses. The lecture, reading, and seminar discussion components of the course will focus on topics important to collaborative development -- to be prepared to implement, manage, and apply in a variety of research and applications areas, and in multiple geographical and institutional contexts.
GWS 595-001: The Rural Queer. Instructor: Carol Mason. Meets: TR. Time: 11-00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. This advanced course explores how lesbian and gay historians and queer theorists have recently been theorizing the so-called rural queer. In addition to reading histories and ethnographies of actually existing GLBTQ people in rural communities, we will examine key concepts, cultural assumptions, and analytical categories that have come under scrutiny in the midst of recent scholarly inquiry. Among these are visibility, coming out, metronormativity, queer mobility, homonormativity, tolerance, and a variety of antigay concepts such as the ex-gay, the gay agenda, and the homosexual-as-terrorist. Our goal in examining these concepts is to map the scholarly inquiry into the rural queer – why such an inquiry arose and how it intersects with academic studies of globalization, critical regionalism, racial formation, social movements, and political rhetoric. This course is not recommended as a first course in sexuality studies.
Graduate
MUS 702 Musicology Seminar: American Sacred Music Expression. Instructor: Ron Pen. Meets: W. Time: 3:30-6:00 p.m. Study and research in specific musicological problems. Music of the Appalachian region will be included in the content of the course, and student projects may be related to sacred music of Appalachia. Prereq: Consent of instructor.
SOC 735 Seminar in Social Inequalities: Inequality in Appalachia. Instructor: Dwight Billings. Meets: T. Time: 7:00-9:30 p.m. This course is an elective in the Sociology Department’s program in Social Inequalities. While it is organized by a sociological framework, it is also intended to serve as a graduate level introduction to multidisciplinary scholarship in Appalachian Studies. We will examine a few “classic” and mostly recent studies to explore interpretive shifts, controversies, and debates in Appalachian Studies, especially as they relate to the study of race, class, and gender. Topics will include Appalachia’s discursive formation (its “discovery” in the late nineteenth century), the construction of “tradition,” controversies over the politics of culture, interpretations of the region’s social history and development, and other topics such as poverty, globalization, politics and activism, healthcare, religion, and the environment including mountaintop removal coal mining. A sub-theme will focus on the relationships between Appalachian Studies and other critical cultural studies including post-colonialism, subaltern studies, and the intersectionality of inequalities. Among the goals of the course will be to provide a context for the critical assessment of new works in Appalachian Studies as well as the space to begin work on a publishable or presentable paper in the field that might be submitted to for presentation at the Appalachian Studies annual conference or conferences in students’ home disciplines. In addition to works in sociology, we will read new contributions to Appalachian studies of inequality from Anthropology, English, Education, History, Geography, and Political Science.
SOC 735 Seminar in Social Inequalities: Inequality in Appalachia. Instructor: Dwight Billings. Meets: T. Time: 7:00-9:30 p.m. This course is an elective in the Sociology Department’s program in Social Inequalities. While it is organized by a sociological framework, it is also intended to serve as a graduate level introduction to multidisciplinary scholarship in Appalachian Studies. We will examine a few “classic” and mostly recent studies to explore interpretive shifts, controversies, and debates in Appalachian Studies, especially as they relate to the study of race, class, and gender. Topics will include Appalachia’s discursive formation (its “discovery” in the late nineteenth century), the construction of “tradition,” controversies over the politics of culture, interpretations of the region’s social history and development, and other topics such as poverty, globalization, politics and activism, healthcare, religion, and the environment including mountaintop removal coal mining. A sub-theme will focus on the relationships between Appalachian Studies and other critical cultural studies including post-colonialism, subaltern studies, and the intersectionality of inequalities. Among the goals of the course will be to provide a context for the critical assessment of new works in Appalachian Studies as well as the space to begin work on a publishable or presentable paper in the field that might be submitted to for presentation at the Appalachian Studies annual conference or conferences in students’ home disciplines. In addition to works in sociology, we will read new contributions to Appalachian studies of inequality from Anthropology, English, Education, History, Geography, and Political Science.
SUMMER 2012
APP 200 Introduction to Appalachian Studies. Instructor: Catherine Herdman. Meets: On-line, First six weeks summer session. This course is a multidisciplinary introduction to Appalachian culture, history, and society. It will examine how and why the central and southern Appalachian Mountains came to be viewed as a distinct region, “Appalachia,” and it will examine Appalachia's place in American life. We will encounter the region's rich traditions of music and literature; its rural social life including kinship and neighborhood institutions; coal mining history, community patterns, and labor struggles; gender; the experiences of Native Americans, African Americans, and Eastern Europeans in Appalachia; inequality and poverty; community politics and grassroots struggles; and current environmental issues including mountaintop removal coal mining.
SOC 235 Inequalities in Society. Instructor: Shaunna Scott. Meets: Online, TBD. Analysis of the social origins, development, and persistence of inequality in various societies. One of the five modules for this course focuses on Appalachia. Prereq: SOC 101 or RSO 102. (Same as AAS 235.)
APP 300 Development in Appalachia. Instructor: Amanda Fickey. Meets: On Campus, Second six weeks summer session. The term “Appalachia” may be understood in multiple ways. While the term is often associated with various socio-economic and political meanings, it also refers to the remarkable physical geography of ancient mountains that created a diversity of distinctive ecologies. This course will focus on the dynamic interplay between these meanings, power, wealth, biodiversity and landscape in shaping the cultural, economic, political history, and geography of this region over the past 200 years. Major themes will revolve around local, state, and regional development policies and practices as well as the exploration of alternative economic and political spaces.
For more information, contact: Ann Kingsolver, Director, Appalachian Studies Program. ann.kingsolver@uky.edu 859-257-4852
Appalachian Center
University of Kentucky
624 Maxwelton Court
Lexington, KY 40506-0347
