Fighting King Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in Central Appalachia

by Shannon Elizabeth Bell

Overview

An examination of why so few people suffering from environmental hazards and pollution choose to participate in environmental justice movements.

In the coal-mining region of Central Appalachia, mountaintop-removal mining and coal-industry-related flooding, water contamination, and illness have led to the emergence of a grassroots, women-driven environmental justice movement. But the number of local activists is small relative to the affected population, and recruiting movement participants from within the region is an ongoing challenge.

In Fighting King Coal, Shannon Elizabeth Bell examines an understudied puzzle within social movement theory: why so few of the many people who suffer from industry-produced environmental hazards and pollution rise up to participate in social movements aimed at bringing about social justice and industry accountability. Using the coal-mining region of Central Appalachia as a case study, Bell investigates the challenges of micromobilization through in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis, geospatial viewshed analysis, and an eight-month “Photovoice” project—an innovative means of studying, in real time, the social dynamics affecting activist involvement in the region. Although the Photovoice participants took striking photographs and wrote movingly about the environmental destruction caused by coal production, only a few became activists. Bell reveals the importance of local identities to the success or failure of local recruitment efforts in social movement struggles, ultimately arguing that, if the local identities of environmental justice movements are lost, the movements may also lose their power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262333603
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/18/2016
Series:	Urban and Industrial Environments
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	9 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Shannon Elizabeth Bell is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Contextualizing the Case: Central Appalachia 15

I Identifying the Barriers to Participation

2 Micro-Level Processes and Participation in Social Movements 39

3 Depletion of Social Capital in Coalfield Communities 49

4 Identity and Participation in the Environmental Justice Movement 75

5 Cognitive Liberation, Cultural Manipulation, and Friends of Coal 89

6 Cognitive Liberation and Hidden Destruction in Central Appalachia 109

7 Summary of Part I 119

II Creating a Micromobilization Context

8 Creating a Micromobilization Context through Photovoice 123

9 Photovoice in Five Coal-Mining Communities 147

10 Becoming, and Un-Becoming, an Activist 231

Conclusion 249

Appendix A Data-Collection Methods and Tables for Chapter 3 259

Appendix B Interview Methods and Demographics of the Study Sample for Chapter 4 265

Appendix C Creation of the Coal-Critical Index and Analysis of Pre-Project and Post-Project Results in Photovoice Croups and Control Croups 267

Appendix D Photovoice Participation, Coal-Critical Photographs Shared, and Coal-Critical Photostories Created 271

Notes 287

References 295

Index 313

Series List

What People are Saying About This

David N. Pellow

In Fighting King Coal, Bell presents an innovative approach to a surprisingly undertheorized phenomenon: the problem of inaction in the face of social injustice and oppression. Her methodological design is groundbreaking, providing tools to explore social processes that researchers are not usually able to observe. Bell demonstrates an extraordinary commitment to the highest quality scholarship, and the significance of this book's message and conclusions cannot be overstated.

Endorsement

In Fighting King Coal, Bell presents an innovative approach to a surprisingly undertheorized phenomenon: the problem of inaction in the face of social injustice and oppression. Her methodological design is groundbreaking, providing tools to explore social processes that researchers are not usually able to observe. Bell demonstrates an extraordinary commitment to the highest quality scholarship, and the significance of this book's message and conclusions cannot be overstated.

—David N. Pellow, Dehlsen Professor of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara; author of Resisting Global Toxics and Total Liberation, and coauthor of The Slums of Aspen

From the Publisher

By studying both successful and unsuccessful instances of mobilization against 'King Coal' and local residents who did and did not join these efforts, Bell has authored a highly original book that offers an important corrective to the regrettable tendency of scholars to 'select on the dependent variable' in studying both movements and individual activism. An altogether welcome, if sobering, addition to the literature on movements.

—Doug McAdam, Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology, Stanford University; coauthor of Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America

In Fighting King Coal, Bell presents an innovative approach to a surprisingly undertheorized phenomenon: the problem of inaction in the face of social injustice and oppression. Her methodological design is groundbreaking, providing tools to explore social processes that researchers are not usually able to observe. Bell demonstrates an extraordinary commitment to the highest quality scholarship, and the significance of this book's message and conclusions cannot be overstated.

—David N. Pellow, Dehlsen Professor of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara; author of Resisting Global Toxics and Total Liberation, and coauthor of The Slums of Aspen

Doug McAdam

By studying both successful and unsuccessful instances of mobilization against 'King Coal' and local residents who did and did not join these efforts, Bell has authored a highly original book that offers an important corrective to the regrettable tendency of scholars to 'select on the dependent variable' in studying both movements and individual activism. An altogether welcome, if sobering, addition to the literature on movements.