Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields April 26, 2010

Rebecca Scott is a professor of Sociology at the University of Missouri. Her current research concerns the cultural context of various transformations in the coal industry in southern West Virginia, particularly mountaintop removal coal mining. She has focused on questions of how identity formations such as whiteness, masculinity, and different class cultures intersect with Appalachian regional marginalization and national political culture to generate the conditions of possibility for environmentally destructive practices, as well as for environmental justice and labor activism. Organized by the Environment, Culture, and Sustainability Group of Quadrant.

The question of how communities come to tolerate the destruction of their environment is often understood through the frame of "jobs versus the environment," as though these were self-evident and mutually exclusive choices. However, the case of mountaintop removal coal mining demonstrates that what counts as work in a given context is both a political and cultural question. This talk will consider how the gendering of coal mining embeds this particular kind of job in cultural contexts that give the industry more than simply economic significance.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/quadrantcal.php