Appalachia is foundational in the American cultural imagination, both lauded as a conceptual birthplace for folksy Americana and held as at arm’s length as a blighted internal Other. Perhaps even more significantly, it is a series of extraction sites, with coal mines and clear-cut forests spread all along the East Coast from Ohio to Georgia. In this course, we will examine how Appalachian people have engaged with the environment through artistic expression, including music, film, literature, material culture, and foodways. We will take a multimedia approach, combining relevant scholarly or secondary literature with critical media analysis.
Writing More-than-Human Worlds Syllabus, Fall 2021
“How do anthropologists write about, and with, nonhumans like animals, plants, and fungi? This course guides students in writing across species boundaries, drawing from writing that focuses on more-than-human relations in the social sciences and humanities. This is a W-Adv course, and as such students will be guided through the process of writing, reviewing, and editing using specialized language related to multispecies and more-than-human ethnography.”