Being Country: Appalachian Adolescents Discursively Negotiate Social Positions and Racialized Identities

• In Event: Lived Experiences in Negotiating Diverse Rural Identities

Abstract

This paper reports initial findings from a year-long study of discourse, language, and identity of adolescents in rural Appalachian school. Given the sociocultural and linguistic context of the region, the project examined how white adolescents in an ELA classroom situated themselves and each other in the raced, classed and gendered discourses available in the community. Through discourse analysis, the study reveals the process of social differentiation along racial and social class axes that inform the negotiation of variations of “country” identity positions including “country thugs” that are juxtaposed with racist imagined forms of Blackness. Rural educators must use understandings of local racialized discourses to create situated critical pedagogies that dismantle anti-Blackness in schools.

Authors

• Audra Slocum, West Virginia University

• Kirk Hazen, West Virginia University

• Michael Lane, West Virginia University

• Jessica L Lough, West Virginia University

• Tamicah T. Owens, West Virginia University