Making and Breaking Big Rural: Science and Technology Construct the Coalfield

Making and Breaking Big Rural: Science and Technology Construct the Coalfield examines the socio-technical construction of a specific rural industrial space: an Appalachian coalfield. High poverty, social issues such as... [ view full abstract ]

Making and Breaking Big Rural: Science and Technology Construct the Coalfield examines the socio-technical construction of a specific rural industrial space: an Appalachian coalfield. High poverty, social issues such as addiction, and environmental issues such as brownfield remediation in this space are tied to technological shifts such as automation, single economic sector totalitarian work and living space in the United States, and depletion of social capital through federal and corporate deterioration of anchor institutions such as unions. The Pocahontas Coalfield serves as a principal case study regarding the implications of how automation, and federal and state scientific research priorities, implicate science and technology in the construction also of social issues and how the culture of science and technology as practiced in this space becomes, in academia and also in the polity, theoretically subsumed in favor of other ruralities such as ethnic or regional identities simultaneously existent. Fulfilling the academic gap in how to examine and to address this kind of rural and industrial space, this paper shifts the theorization of this space from largely the territory of rural studies rooted in social deficit and world systems theories to a model that includes an analysis of this single sector energy extractive space through its role in a large technical system. Additionally, this paper models how to examine a rural industrial aka “big rural” space dominated through science and technology as a space with democratic potential, rooted in actionable democratic foundation principles such as equity and liberty. Likewise, a macro analysis of the rural industrial offers paths to the creation of a US national rural strategy toward reconfiguring the relationship of science and technology research to and on the rural.