You can’t address Appalachia without addressing addiction, namely the opioid epidemic. At Queer Appalachia, we try to shed light on the prevalence of this problem in the region and seek to emphasize that nobody— regardless of addiction status— is disposable.

With the disheartening and exponentially increasing rate of opioid abuse in Appalachia, there is nobody in the region who doesn’t play a role. As if being queer in rural regions isn’t isolating and ostracizing enough, the addition of trying to recover only further exacerbates these experiences. The numbers of opioid abuse in Appalachia increase significantly when you looking at folks with queer identities.

 

Queer Appalachia responds to our community's needs by offering Harm Reduction trainings and supplies.

Black women turn out to vote at higher rates than any other group of Americans. They are also incarcerated at twice the rate of white women, and have been incarcerated at higher rates than black men since 1980. This interdisciplinary panel explores black women's experiences at the intersection of citizenship and criminal justice from the perspectives of law, social science, literature, and lived experience.

Damaris Hill. Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and English literature in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Hill is the author of A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing, a book of poetry on black women’s incarceration, and Amazon #1 best seller in African American Poetry.

Melynda J. Price. William L. Matthews, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky and Director of the Gaines Center for the Humanities. Dr. Price’s research focus on black women’s activism and criminal justice.

Bridgett King. Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the MPA program at Auburn University. Dr. King is an expert on felony disenfranchisement and black political participation.

Tanya Fogle, Alumnus of University of Kentucky, former Lady Cat, Community activist with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.  Ms. Fogle draws on her own experiences with felony conviction and political rights restoration to advocate for the re-enfranchisement of individuals with felony convictions in Kentucky.

This hybrid event, open to students, faculty, and staff, offers the opportunity for participants to explore the concept of integration and to define what that means at the University of Kentucky. As they are prompted to think about what we can all do in our respective inter-campus communities to begin to move steps beyond inclusion and into creating equity in the classroom, residence hall, office, or even more broadly within programs and student organizations, participants will leave this lunch workshop/discussion having identified an opportunity to enhance equity in their area of work and/or with a concrete idea for implementing some action.

Every year, the Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA) invites an outstanding anthropologist from outside the university to give a public talk as part of our Distinguished Lecturer Series. For 2020, we are pleased to host Dr. Khiara Bridges, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and former Associate Dean of Equity, Justice, and Engagement at Boston University.

Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning, race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared or will soon appear in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press.

Dunstan is the NCSU Assistant Director of the Office of Assessment. Her research examines dialect as an element of diversity that shapes the college experience, particularly for speakers of non-standardized dialects of English. Dunstan and Jaeger (2015) found that students from rural, Southern Appalachia felt that their use of a regional dialect put them at a disadvantage in the college classroom. The students interviewed by Dunstan reported that “they had been hesitant to speak in class, felt singled out, dreaded oral presentations, tried to change the way they talked, and felt that they had to work harder to earn the respect of faculty and peers”. In addition to speaking about her work with Appalachian college students, Dunstan would accompany members of the Department of Linguistics to a meeting with the UK office of Academic and Student Affairs to discuss how to meet the needs of all UK students, regardless of linguistic background.

In this talk Dr. Rucker-Chang explores the uses and meanings of "Blackness" in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1992) and its successor states of Serbia and Montenegro. To reflect on the mechanisms of cultural and social incorporation of “Blacks” in Yugoslavia, she highlights how, in defiance to Yugoslav narratives of ethnic and racial inclusion, post-Yugoslav identity has adopted a normative ethnic value of  "whiteness" as an inalienable, exclusive feature of belonging.

Sunnie Rucker-Chang is an Assistant Professor of Slavic and East European Studies and Director of European Studies at University of Cincinnati. Her primary interests lie in cultural and racial formation(s) in the Balkans. She is a co-editor of and contributor to the book Chinese Migrants in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2011). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Critical Romani Studies, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Her co-authored book, Roma Rights and US Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Approach, is currently in press with Cambridge University Press, and her co-edited volume Balkan Migrants: to, from, and in the Balkans: Identity, Alterity, and Culture is under contract with Liverpool University Press. For the 2019-2020 academic year Sunnie will work on her monograph focusing on racial formations and Blackness in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space for which she has been awarded an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship.

Sponsored by the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Department of African American and Africana Studies, Department of History, International Studies, Department of Anthropology and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Join us for free food, free t-shirts, and giveaways as we kick off a year that will feature a series of events looking at the history and the future of equity at the University of Kentucky and beyond. Our featured speaker Dr. George C. Wright, Distinguished Visiting Professor of HIstory, will explain why Lyman T. Johnson's successful desegregation lawsuit still matter today, 70 years later.