| Popis: |
Throughout Appalachian Ohio, residents in small post-industrial cities grapple with redefining themselves as a place and a people in order to compete in the global economy. Young people caught in the middle of this economic transition—those born after the major factory closings in the early 1980s—struggle to negotiate their relationships with their hometowns, which typically offer limited career options beyond the service sector. Listening to the stories of college students and residents from postindustrial Appalachian Ohio helps us understand the ways in which place, economics, and identity intersect in their lives. In a region where cooperation regularly makes up for a lack of resources, leaving to attend college becomes a fraught decision. Moral geographies of the region—the ways in which people position themselves in relation to people and place—are thus filled with reflections from elsewhere, constructions of self and community that are responsive to the expectations of peers, outsiders, and discourses of success and failure that influence everyday choices. Reflections from elsewhere work in two ways in this dissertation: they are both the lived negotiations of self in response to the expectations of others as well as the ways that students and residents reflect upon, evaluate, and tell stories about the ruptures that have shaped their experiences. Students’ negotiations of place reveal the tensions they experience in coming from a place that is impossible to return to without the stigma of failure and to which continued belonging is possible only by habitually traversing the long-worn road home. Road stories, then, become all the more important as units of analysis, and force us to consider notions of place that cannot be defined in terms of a single locale. Contextualizing the students’ evaluative discourse, I examine critical positionings staked out by the university and home communities that shed light on the ways in which economic instability strains students’ relationships with home. I attend to important spaces in which reflections from elsewhere are prominent, analyzing both public and private “moral archives” of deindustrialization and recuperation. These moral archives are analyzed in contrast to the negative relationship between home and opportunity constructed by a university service-learning initiative directed toward the region (Ohio State University’s Buck-I-Serv Alternative Spring Break), as it seeks to orient young people toward college. Appalachia has long been a place where knowledge, resources, and representation intersect. While the moral archives of community elders attempt to hold these conflicting elements together, the moral geographies constructed by college students map that struggle onto the binary oppositions offered to them by the dominant culture. Both in reflection and reality, Appalachian Ohio students continuously travel the roads between points of value. This evaluative activity leads to some unexpected outcomes for individuals and undermines the seeming split between “going” and “staying.” Reflections from elsewhere among Appalachian Ohioans—as among many populations pushed toward mobility by a global economy—shape the life decisions of individuals. They merit the attention of the educators and policymakers who, wittingly or unwittingly, provide some of the mirrors. |
