Transforming Places: Lessons from Appalachia (review)

Transforming Places provides several studies of place-based citizen activism in Appalachia, offering lessons to those who struggle for social justice around the world. Divided into three sections, the volume examines identity construction, alliance-building, and efforts to “scale up” resistance from the local to regional and global levels. Its essays cover a variety of issues from resistance to the military-industrial complex to community struggles with prescription drug abuse. What do such a diverse array of political struggles and social issues have in common? The editors answer that question by deftly uniting these case studies into a framework which emphasizes the shifting opportunities and challenges of a neoliberal globalizing regime that has seriously weakened the labor union movement and nearly dismantled the welfare state. In so doing, Fisher and Smith continue a long legacy of Appalachian research demonstrating how Appalachia is connected to and relevant to the rest of the world.

Before turning to the essays themselves, it is worth highlighting the editors’ contextualization of prescription drug abuse, an issue which appears to have no sociopolitical cause or recourse. Comparing contemporary prescription drug abuse to the struggle for Black Lung benefits in an earlier era, the editors point out: “What counts as a ‘social problem’ and what remedies exist to treat it have shifted in ways that render collective political action more elusive. . . . The contrast between a collective sensibility of a disease [Black Lung] as the product of class exploitation . . . and the highly individualistic, victim-blaming discourse associated with drug addiction, vividly exemplifies the self-fulfilling logic of neoliberalism: What is individually borne is no more or less than the fault of the individual and therefore should not be collectively redressed” (5–6). This volume encourages us to challenge this neoliberal logic.

Because the essays in this volume are engaging and accessible, this book is appropriate for both academic and lay audiences. I will certainly assign it in undergraduate and graduate level courses on social inequalities, community development, politics, and Appalachian studies. The most useful to organizers are those which document grassroots organizing efforts: the now-defunct Southern Empowerment Project (133–43), the Center for Participatory Change (122–32), the Virginia Organizing Project (183–97), the Community Farm Alliance (210–25), and Mountain Justice (226–38). Though they do not provide identical blueprints for success–that would not be possible given the diversity of places in which they operate, their lessons nevertheless have common themes: the importance of staff-leadership relations, options for more decentralized, flexible organizational structures, issues accompanying foundation support, the need to confront racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism, strategies to engage power at the most effective scalar level, and the centrality of coalition-building, alliance, and inclusion (see also the essay on international coalitions, 252–66).

Academic audiences will appreciate the conclusion which draws and builds upon neo-Marxian, feminist theory from geography. The distinction between place and space, central to geography, deserve wider circulation. Popular and policy discussions about globalization too often cede causal priority to the “abstract, spatial” forces of capitalism while dismissing “local, place-based” forces as uniformly reactionary and insular. We could benefit from greater recognition that the wrongly imagined inevitable, abstracted, displaced forces of neoliberal capitalism are in fact embodied, locally situated practices and logics which privilege some people and places over others. This volume succeeds in making that case and, therefore, will win a place on the shelves of scholars, practitioners and activists alike.