40th Annual ASA Conference

EXTREME Appalachia! March 9-12, 2017 Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia

file:///C:/Users/Wilburn/AppData/Local/Temp/2017-preliminary-program2.pdf

“Extreme Appalachia” is the theme for the 40th annual Appalachian Studies Conference. By "extreme" we mean the impassioned commitments people have to the region, the land, and Appalachian communities, ways of life, and livelihoods. We mean the ways extreme economics—excessive resource extraction and use, underfunding of public education and services, and dismal job opportunities—have sparked community resilience and activism that advance a sustainable future for the region. “Extreme Appalachia” also references exploitative pop culture products like reality television programming—as well as the countering power of the region’s visual, performance, and literary arts to nurture, provoke, and inspire. In the face of extremity, regionalist scholarship continues to augment ongoing struggles for racial, social, economic, and environmental justice.

Conference registration is handled by the University of Illinois Press. Please visit:
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/jas/subscription.html to register for the 2017 conference.

Appalachian Studies Association Diversity and Inclusion Committee

Saturday March 11, 2017 8AM

40th Annual ASA Conference
EXTREME Appalachia! March 9-12, 2017 Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia

Appalachian Studies Association Diversity and Inclusion Committee

Agenda

The meeting is open to all. Please invite others who are interested.

• Feedback on Friday’s session Building Transformative Communities and Collective People Power, led by Kierra Sims and Samir Rohlin Hazboun of Highlander – content, logistics, timing.
• Next year’s Diversity and Inclusion-sponsored session for the ASA conference in Cincinnati
• Guidelines for gender neutral pronouns and whether we want to adopt one of them for next year for both nametags and the program
• Other 

Diversity and Inclusion Committee Conference Sessions

Friday 10:30-12:45pm; Session 2.1: Organizing | Diversity and Inclusion Committee Workshop

Building Transformative Communities and Collective People Power

Sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Virginia Tech

This workshop continues through lunch. Lunch is also offered courtesy of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Virginia Tech to those who preregistered at http://tinyurl.com/ASAsignups.

This session will explore how systemic forms of oppression are manifested in our daily lives and will build collective analysis around the importance of acknowledging race and class privilege in an economic transition movement with lower and working class people at the forefront.

Conveners:

Kierra Sims, Highlander Research and Education Center

Samir Rohlin Hazboun, Highlander Research and Education Center

Friday 1-2:15 Urgent Issues: Confronting White Supremacy in Appalachian Communities

Facilitators: Izzy Broomfield and Beth Bingman

With Eastern Kentucky Organizers Liz Sanders and Stacie Sexton

This session will address the rise in white supremacist organizing in central Appalachia. Using Pikeville, KY as a case study, attendees will hear what's happening on the ground in eastern Kentucky, and will discuss strategies for confronting white supremacy in their own communities.

In addition, there is a session on Saturday led by members of Central Kentucky SURJ - Showing Up for Racial Justice.

There is also a room set aside for discussion of these and other important issues confronting the region.

Remake Learning checked in with an article on coal

In Appalachia, Preparing for Life After Coal by Sarah Jackson

President Trump has vowed to “put coal country back to work.” On the campaign trail he promised to bring back jobs to the industry. And in February, he got rid of a stream protection regulation he called a “job-killing rule.”

But many in the region aren’t counting on President Trump to solve all their problems.

Instead, new programs in states hit by deindustrialization aim to diversify local economies, retrain workers, and create a pipeline of new workers prepared for jobs, like coding, in the new economy.

Education, and “re-education,” are big parts of this picture.

In “The Next Big Blue Collar Job is Coding,” Wired Magazine’s Clive Thompson thinks learning to code may be akin to learning to weld in the past—a path to the middle class. He points to local programs like CodeTN that is encouraging local high school students in Tennessee to attend coding program at community colleges. Thompson argues that introducing kids to vocational training in computer science in high school may be a better idea than always urging four-year degrees.

“These sorts of coders won’t have the deep knowledge to craft wild new algorithms for flash trading or neural networks. Why would they need to? That level of expertise is rarely necessary at a job. But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling Java­Script for their local bank. That’s a solidly middle-class job, and middle-class jobs are growing: The national average salary for IT jobs is about $81,000 (more than double the national average for all jobs), and the field is set to expand by 12 percent from 2014 to 2024, faster than most other occupations.”

In Pittsburgh, husband and wife duo Amanda Laucher and Jonathan Graham are developing programs to train coal miners to code, for free. Mining Minds, in Greene County just south of Pittsburgh, helps displaced coal miners learn to code from the comfort of their homes. Laucher, a Greene County native, saw her brother struggle to find a job after coal and it struck her that she could help. She and her husband, an avid coder, launched Mining Minds as a nonprofit coding school. “They heard from coal miners and economic developers in the region that these guys didn’t want to drive for training,” Linda Topoleski of Allegheny Conference on Community Development told us. So they brought coding to them. Not only can miners learn to code online, but they can then become contract coders and work online from home.

These efforts are also tackling another problem: the pipeline is empty. Pittsburgh’s local institutions are working closely with businesses and technology firms to address the region’s “pipeline problem” —the fact that the region isn’t graduating enough children with the skills they need to meet future employer demand.

As we wrote on this blog in the fall:

"Catalyst Connection, an economic development organization focused on small manufacturers, for example, connects employers with students directly. The organization runs ten-week programs that have students solving real-world problems for the business. Students visit the company, learn about an issue or problem that has arisen, and then go back to the classroom to come up with a solution.”

“We aren’t so crazy to think we can just train people for jobs that don’t exist,” says Jeff Hawkins, the director of the education cooperative in Kentucky. “We have to train them in technical areas for jobs that they can get immediately.”

And who knows where that will lead. Governing Magazine recently reported on the Kentucky Valley Education Cooperative, 19 school districts in the southeastern part of the state that was originally formed to pool their purchasing power and save money on basic supplies.

Now, writes Governing’s Alan Greenblatt “it runs all kinds of joint training ventures—participating in computer hackathons for rural health, instructing kids on aviation and aeronautics, helping students combine coal spores with algae to create a new biofuel. The results have been impressive. The percentage of high school students who are assessed as ready for college or careers is nearly 90 percent—up from less than 60 percent five years ago.”

Sarah Jackson | March 7, 2017 at 8:00 am | Tags: rural, west virginia | Categories: Blog Post | URL: http://wp.me/p46hoI-8lU

NYT covers Pittsburgh and Underground Railroad

Artice to consider.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/travel/pittsburgh-pennsylvania-underground-railroad-slavery.html

Not doing well in fight against cancer

https://healthfinder.gov/News/Article.aspx?id=716118&source=govdelivery&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

Rural Appalachia Faces Growing Cancer Crisis, Research Shows

 It's the only region in the U.S. that hasn't made big progress in fighting the disease. Rural Appalachia Faces Growing Cancer Crisis, Research Shows

While the rest of the United States makes major strides against cancer, a cancer crisis is taking hold in rural Appalachia.
A University of Virginia (UVA) team analyzed federal government data and found that between 1969 and 2011, cancer rates fell in every U.S. region except rural Appalachia.
Over the study period, rural Appalachia went from having the nation's lowest cancer death rate to the highest. Cancer death rates were nearly 15 percent higher in Virginia's rural Appalachian counties than in non-Appalachian urban areas nationwide. In rural Appalachian areas of Kentucky, cancer death rates rose 36 percent.
Rural residents in every state in the Appalachian region, except Maryland, had higher cancer death rates than their urban counterparts, the study found.
"Almost 40 percent more cancer mortalities [in rural Kentucky] than in the other United States. I think that's crazy," researcher Nengliang (Aaron) Yao said in a university news release.
In addition, people in Appalachia are more likely to die within three to five years of their cancer diagnoses than people in urban areas outside the region, and breast cancer is less likely to be caught early, the researchers said.
Yao cited several economic, geographic and political barriers to quality cancer care in the region.
"They don't use a lot of health care. It means they don't spend a lot of CMS [U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] money, and if you don't spend, you won't be considered high-cost patients," said Yao. He is an assistant professor of public health sciences in the School of Medicine and the UVA Cancer Center.
"If you're not high-cost patients, it is hard to draw attention from policymakers and payers," Yao added.
Other problems include widespread poverty, high levels of smoking and obesity, and poor access to health care, the study authors noted.
The study was published recently in the Journal of Rural Health.

A letter from a free man to his former slave owner from before the Civil War

Historians know of this letter, but it is now getting more popular with social media.

https://www.good.is/articles/jordan-andersons-legendary-clapback?utm_source=121&utm_medium=FB&utm_campaign=swp

Heading home from work

West Virginia workers heading home after a day on the job. Photo from 1910.