Research
My research is situated within the nexus of 20th century cultural and social history with an emphasis on race, education, community, and memory in the rural U.S. South. I seek out the counter-narratives—not so much to revise as to provide alternative histories that have been neglected or erased within the dominant historical narrative. I am interested in people’s histories as told from their perspectives, which means I prioritize oral history in my work. Specifically, I use oral history to reconstruct spaces and their interiority (both physically and culturally) within a particular place during a particular historical moment. My work is undergirded by the tenet that oral history as a methodology is instrumental to not only the historical narratives themselves but to the historic preservation efforts of physical sites and structures.
Dissertation Project
My dissertation, “Blues Hollers: A Pedagogy of Space and the Scale of Black Freedom in Kentucky Appalachia,” is a critical reinterpretation of Appalachian history that confronts the mythology of Black invisibility by illuminating a regional history that is neither lost or hidden—it has always existed.* It uses both oral history and ethnographic methods to examine the experiences of Black Appalachians who came of age in the southeastern Kentucky coalfields during the civil rights movement. Specifically, I explore the ways in which they navigated various educative spaces in the coal camp in the pursuit of freedom within and beyond the mountains. This research is framed through Clyde Woods’s (1998) blues epistemological framework as applied to dialectical and paradoxical spaces (both past and present) in the coal town. Read the abstract here.
Pictured is the concrete addition that was once part of Dunham High School, Letcher County’s all-Black school that operated between 1931-1964 in Jenkins, KY. The main structure was destroyed by fire in 1969. (Photo by Kristan McCullum)
*In the introduction to the Verso paperback edition of Clyde Woods’s Development Arrested, Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, “…we might better encounter archives as proposals rather than proofs. If proposals are evidence of struggle, they indicate, as Woods consistently argues, the perpetual presence of alternatives, neither lost nor in hidden transcripts, but rather out in the open, repeatable, simultaneously syncopating other worlds” (p. xiv).