Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores how how individuals, businesses, and government entities confront dominant industry shifts in the Appalachian region of the US through the remaking of place.

Paper Abstract:

Dominant industries on which regions may depend are often closely linked to place-based identity and local lifeways through economic exchange, material goods, systems of gendered labor and migration, or even relationships with corporate entities. In the Appalachian region of the United States, the dominance of the coal, lumber, and agriculture industries have shaped both cultural values, and fostered “thick” economic and migratory relationships between urban and rural areas of the region. As Appalachia now faces the permanent decline of coal and works to capture new opportunities in manufacturing and technology, the region must engage in a process of remaking a place-based rural identity. This paper asks how individuals, businesses, and government entities confront both larger popular perceptions of the region as isolated or bucolic, and local challenges such a gendered divisions of labor influenced by the coal industry, to shape new kinds of economic futures. I explore how former coal industry workers’ ambivalence about narratives of economic collapse relate to their pursuit of work in high-tech machining and software development, how manufacturing workers negotiate cross-cultural interactions in attempts to forge global economic ties, and how women see themselves taking on new roles in industries historically dominated by men. Such examples inform our understanding of the ways that place and work are co-constructed.