"You Can't Put a Price On It": Activist Anthropology in the Mountaintop Removal Debate

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel R. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Mountaintop Removal ◽  
Activist Anthropology

A Vested Interest: Activist Anthropology in the Mountaintop Removal Debate

2001 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-18
Author(s):  
Samuel Cook
Keyword(s):  
West Virginia ◽  
Surface Mining ◽  
Vested Interest ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mountaintop Removal ◽  
Removal Method ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Activist Anthropology ◽  
Mountain West

"I want you to think about something that means so much to you—that you love so much—that you would give your life for it," said Larry Gibson as he addressed a group of students from my Appalachian Communities class visiting the remnants of his ancestral farm on Kayford Mountain, West Virginia. Most of my students had never given this question much thought. On the other hand, the majority of them (most of whom came from the urban Northeast) had never heard of the mountaintop removal method of surface mining until taking my class.

Authentic Research, Teaching, Events, and Assessments for Economic Prosperity

2022 ◽  
pp. 289-317
Author(s):  
Cassandra R. Decker ◽  
Merci Decker
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Educational Opportunities ◽  
Economic Prosperity ◽  
Research Methodologies ◽  
Activist Anthropology ◽  
Research And Education

Responsive research serves as an alternative platform to address issues of human rights violations, ACEs, structural violence, and systemic poverty in particular as it relates to educational opportunities. This chapter identifies four step-by-step processes that can be used when conducting community-led research and education. Activist anthropology, studying up, studying through, and financial implications of debt foreground earlier efforts made by anthropologists to use their research as a way to examine how policy decisions shape cultural practices and impact the livelihood of specific communities. These efforts are expanded upon by examining the controversy, pitfalls, and rewards found within the epistemological paradigms and research methodologies. The second half of the chapter identifies four pathways researchers can use when engaging in activist anthropology: teaching to a goal; responsive mapping to uncover mystical barriers; community building as the goal for focus groups, interviews, and surveys; and responsive programs and events.

Religion, Friction, and Cultural Encounter in the Anti–Mountaintop Removal Movement

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph D. Witt
Keyword(s):  
Direct Action ◽  
Place Identity ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Mountaintop Removal ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
The Future ◽  
Local Policies

This final chapter examines the cultural encounters and points of friction between different activists and stakeholders associated with the anti-mountaintop removal movement. In their efforts, activists sometimes encountered conflicting views on Appalachian place, identity, and religion. These views met in points of friction, in anthropologist Anna Tsing’s term, where they often hybridized or changed to generate new perspectives on the issue or to support previously held ideas about place, religion, and identity. Examples of these debates include discussions of “insider” Appalachian identity and fears of “outsiders” influencing local policies, concerns among some religious activists of having their efforts co-opted by other groups who do not share their same moral visions, differing visions of the future of post-mountaintop removal Appalachia, and various arguments concerning the ethics and efficacy of direct action tactics.

Religion, Place, and Mountaintop Removal

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph D. Witt
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Strip Mining ◽  
Appalachian Studies ◽  
Mountaintop Removal ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Critical Regionalism ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter examines the historical development of anti-mountaintop removal activism in Appalachia in the early twenty-first century. The chapter first examines how twenty-first-century groups such as Mountain Justice emerged out of decades of localized activism against strip mining in the area. It then outlines the theoretical influences from Appalachian studies and religious studies that have shaped this discussion of religion and place in Appalachia, including studies of Appalachian history and development, critical regionalism, and approaches to “lived religion.” Based on these theoretical concepts, the remainder of the book explores multiple religious threads in the re-imagining of Appalachian place by anti-mountaintop removal activists in light of a physically transformed topography.

The Role of Drones in Anti-Mountaintop Removal Activism

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67
Author(s):  
Aron Douglas Massey
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Environmental Activism ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Mountaintop Removal ◽  
Appalachian Mountain ◽  
Mountaintop Removal Mining

This research project examines the usefulness of drones in environmental activism, especially within the fight against mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. The paper examines the tactics of Coal River Mountain Watch and the Appalachian Mountain Patrol, anti-MTR activists that use drone surveillance to enhance their fight against this destructive practice. The use of drones increases the complexity of strategies employed by Appalachian activists and challenges many of the traditionally held, but continually critiqued, stereotypes present in Appalachian research. Beyond a deeper understanding of Appalachian activism, this paper investigates the ways in which knowledge production and epistemological assumptions are challenged by less costly and more accessible technologies such as drones.

scholarly journals From cartonera publishing practices to trans-formal methods for qualitative research

2020 ◽  
pp. 146879412091451
Author(s):  
Lucy Bell ◽  
Alex Flynn ◽  
Patrick O’Hare
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Collaborative Work ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Community Relations ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
Activist Anthropology ◽  
The One

Interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and counter-disciplinarity are the hallmark of cultural studies and qualitative research, as scholars over the past three decades have discussed through extensive self-reflexive inquiry into their own unstable and ever-shifting methods (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018; Dicks et al., 2006: 78; Grossberg, 2010). Building on the interdisciplinary thought of Jacques Rancière and Caroline Levine on the one hand and traditions of participatory action research and activist anthropology on the other, we bring the methods conversation forward by shifting the focus from disciplines to forms and by making a case for aesthetic practice as qualitative research process. In this paper, the question of methods is approached through the action-based Cartonera Publishing Project with editoriales cartoneras in Latin America – community publishers who make low-cost books out of materials recovered from the street in the attempt to democratise and decolonise literary/artistic production – and specifically through our process-oriented, collaborative work with four cartonera publishers in Brazil and Mexico. Guided by the multiple forms of cartonera knowledge production, which are rooted not in academic research but rather in aesthetic practice and community relations, we offer an innovative ‘trans-formal’ methodological framework, which opens up new pathways for practitioners and researchers to work, think and act across social, cultural and aesthetic forms.

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