After Coal: Power, Development, and Post-Coal Politics in Appalachia
2023-05
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After Coal: Power, Development, and Post-Coal Politics in Appalachia
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2023-05
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In this dissertation, I examine the collapse of the coal industry in Central Appalachia and theeconomic crises of coal’s decline through conjunctural analysis, drawing on the lineage of
Gramscian scholarship in geography. Bringing together feminist political economy, Black
Geographies scholarship, critical development studies, and cultural studies, I examine the
cultural politics and political economy of deindustrialization in Appalachia. In four distinct
chapters, each written for discreet journal publications, I trace the ways that people in
Appalachia have experienced coal’s century-long decline unevenly and differently along
racialized, gendered, and socio-economic class lines. I show how deindustrialization in has been
a process through which racialized and economic inequities are reproduced in Central
Appalachia. In the first chapter, I engage debates about white supremacy and anti-Blackness in
geography, examining the production of the Appalachian region as an instance of white
supremacist developmentalism from the 1880s through the 1960s. In chapter two, I engage
recent conversations in Black Geographies literature to examine the infrastructures of
dispossession that enabled Black people in the coalfields to be the first and most
disproportionately deindustrialized group of people in Central Appalachia, from the 1950s
through the 2000s. In chapter three, I argue that the collapse of the coal industry has enabled the
emergence of a new kind of rentierism in the coalfields, where landowners are finding new rents
in carbon offsets and conservation schemes. In chapter four, I argue that contemporary far right
populist politics in Central Appalachia are the result of the ideological crisis of neoliberalism.
Engaging debates about post-neoliberalism, I diagnose a post-neoliberal conjuncture unfolding in
Central Appalachia. I conclude with a
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2023. Major: Geography. Advisor: Kate Derickson. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 225 pages.
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Schwartzman, Gabe. (2023). After Coal: Power, Development, and Post-Coal Politics in Appalachia. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/257065.
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