{"id":7215,"date":"2018-02-10T13:18:45","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T18:18:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2018\/02\/26\/voices-of-appalachia\/"},"modified":"2022-11-06T20:06:31","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T01:06:31","slug":"voices-of-appalachia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/voices-of-appalachia\/","title":{"rendered":"Hearing the voices of Appalachia"},"content":{"rendered":"

The accomplishments of Furman\u2019s science students are well documented<\/a>, but the university\u2019s unique undergraduate research opportunities don\u2019t end in Plyer Hall. Just ask seniors Maddie Allums, Lucy Lansing and Anna Lackey.<\/p>\n

Their work in a senior seminar class on Appalachian Literature has been accepted for presentation at the 41st annual Appalachian Studies Association Conference\u00a0<\/a>which will be held April 5-8 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Calling it a \u201chuge accomplishment,\u201d Assistant Professor of English Laura Morris said the trio earned their way with outstandingly insightful papers based on one of the five books they were required to read.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were really thinking not only about the writing but also about the issues in Appalachia,\u201d Morris, a West Virginia native who joined the faculty in 2015, says. \u201cThey were thinking on a much broader plane in terms of how the literature speaks to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Students started with a project proposal before moving on to research followed by a literature review. The final step was a seminar-length paper, about 20 pages, which had to be condensed into a conference-length of 8-10 pages. Lansing focused on \u201cThe Birds of Opulence (Kentucky Voices),\u201da 2016 novel by Crystal Wilkinson that deals with mental illness among women.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis book is set in Afrolachia, which is black Appalachia,\u201d she says. \u201cPeople who are not from Appalachia generally think mental illness is the fault of the people there. They\u2019re lazy, they don\u2019t take help when they should \u2026 but women in Appalachia have the cultural resources to solve a lot of these problems for themselves, and they don\u2019t really need people coming in who don\u2019t know what they\u2019re talking about telling them what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lansing, an English\/political science double major, was drawn to the work because of her interest in social justice and discovering that, as a native of Rome, Georgia, she\u2019s from Appalachia herself. \u201cI\u2019ve done a lot of research in my time at Furman, but not a lot in English,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was really fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Allums decided to tackle the first book in the syllabus with a paper titled \u201cAn Intersection of Dichotomies: Gender and the Rural\/Urban Binary in The Dollmaker.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sorry. It will take the breath out of you,\u201d Allums, an Atlanta native, says with a laugh. \u201cI\u2019m a sociology major (along with English) with a particular interest in gender, and I was struck by the huge contrast the author Harriette Arnow drew between the men and women in the novel. Even though we read other books throughout the semester, this stuck with me the whole time. So, when it came time to pick a topic, I thought, ‘I want to know what\u2019s going on here.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Morris thinks research has always been a key part of being an English major.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that we often see the students as learning how to do research, but we don\u2019t always see the product of it,\u201d she says. \u201cWe are bringing research into the humanities, and research is coming out of English departments. Our students are doing important work, good work, and they should be seen and heard.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The accomplishments of Furman\u2019s science students are well documented, but the university\u2019s unique undergraduate research opportunities don\u2019t end in Plyer Hall. Just ask seniors Maddie Allums, Lucy Lansing and Anna […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":7216,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,26,31,61,30,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-administrative","category-english","category-the-furman-advantage","category-top-stories","category-undergraduate-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}