West Virginia University Press has released “Gendered Infrastructures” and “Hell's Not Far Off: Bruce Crawford and the Appalachian Left" today (March 1). The two books are of interest to scholars working in areas as broad and global as critical feminist theory, and as intensely local as West Virginia's southern coalfields.
“Gendered Infrastructures” delves into the complex relationships between identity, social relations and infrastructure. By drawing on feminist scholarship to enable new frameworks for critical study, this edited volume explores how gender is always present in the quotidian building blocks that organize the socio-material world and daily life.
Edited by Yaffa Truelove and Anu Sabhlok, the book is the third volume in Amy Trauger and Jennifer Fluri’s “Gender, Feminism, and Geography” series. The original essays in “Gendered Infrastructures” respond to and build upon a “new infrastructural turn in critical scholarship.”
Truelove is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and the Program in International Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder. Anu Sabhlok is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali.
“Hell's Not Far Off: Bruce Crawford and the Appalachian Left" by Josh Howard offers a grounded, politically engaged study of the Appalachian journalist and political critic Bruce Crawford. Crawford fought injustices wherever he saw them at major risk to his own life and became an early interpreter of Appalachian labor history.
Through Crawford’s Weekly, a newspaper active from 1920 to 1935, Crawford challenged the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs and the private police forces of coal barons. In his work after journalism, he led the West Virginia branch of the Federal Writers’ Project during the political standoff over the contents of the state’s official guidebook.
“Hell’s Not Far Off” resurrects strands of a radical tradition centered on labor, environment and race. Howard writes, “Present-day Appalachia’s fights were [Crawford’s], and his fights are still ours.”
Josh Howard is the co-founder of Passel Applied History Consulting, where he works as an applied historian.
Faculty, staff and students may purchase these and other titles, including upcoming publications, at https://wvupressonline.com/.