About

Emily Satterwhite is a scholar of the histories, societies, and cultural representations of Appalachia with expertise in community engaged research. She is a professor and the director of the Appalachian Studies program at Virginia Tech, which offers a Pathways minor in Appalachian Cultures and Environments. She holds the Edward S. Diggs Endowed Professorial Chair in Humanities at Virginia Tech. Satterwhite serves as co-director of Monuments Across Appalachia alongside Katrina Powell and is co-editor of the book Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia: Reimagining Place, Identity, and Mobility (Rivanna Books, UVA Press). Her recent publications include contributions to Oxford Bibliographies of Environmental History and articles on historical perceptions of health in coal-dependent counties. Her book Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878 (2011) has received the Weatherford Award for best nonfiction about Appalachia and the Phi Beta Kappa Sturm Award.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Engineering
• Psychology
• Art
• Socioeconomics
• Art history
• Social psychology
• Law
• Linguistics
• History
• Engineering ethics
• Medicine
• Public relations
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Theology
• Psychotherapist
• Applied psychology
• Medical education
• Epistemology
• Literature

Selected publications

• The Urgency of Protest

  Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov Series IV Philology and Cultural Studies · 2023-02-02

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper makes a case for academicians to promote, support, and participate in nonviolent direct action in our roles as teachers and scholars given the unfolding climate catastrophe and the extent to which academic institutions are complicit in the systems driving ecological breakdown. Drawing from recent experiences resisting fossil fuel infrastructure in Appalachia and the literature on social movements, I argue that specialists in marginalized economies and societies in the Appalachian and Carpathian Mountains are primed to critique dominant narratives about economic growth and state nationalism, to embrace the reputation of mountains as ungovernable, and to leverage international networks for the sake of mass disobedience and mutual aid.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Movie-Made Appalachia: History, Hollywood, and the Highland South by John C. Inscoe

  The Journal of Southern History · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A review of the book Movie-Made Appalachia: History, Hollywood, and the Highland South. By John C. Inscoe. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. viii, 239. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6014-1.)

  PublisherDOI

• Affection, Not Scorn

  Reception Texts Readers Audiences History · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  ABSTRACT Literary historians note that Jesse Stuart’s impetus for his satirical portrait of a hill-country clan in his 1943 novel Taps for Private Tussie was his scorn for government aid. Close readings support a common interpretation of the cultural work performed by the novel: that it ridicules the Tussie clan and links welfare programs to laziness. A reception study of Stuart’s archived correspondence, however, indicates that Stuart’s fans read his characters as pastoral, authentic, and endearing. Readers’ bemused and antimodernist appreciation for white hill people, understood as a category apart, transpired as part of Americans’ imaginations of race and poverty and attitudes toward public policy. In some cases, readers’ jealousy of the Tussies hint at an anti-capitalist stirring. Insights drawn from a combination of close reading, reader reception analysis, and attention to public policy over time suggest just how much the study of fiction and its audiences matters.

  PublisherDOI

• North American Universities and Socioecological Transformation

  2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Otto et al (2020) suggest areas where interventions may trigger a “social tipping point” in efforts to address the climate and ecological crisis. One of the six is climate education and engagement, a natural leadership realm for higher education. Yet Garner et al (2021) observe that universities’ efforts to address the climate and ecological emergency (CEE) are “insufficient” due to “time lags” between education/research and effects as well as universities’ “failure” to confront politics “or the forces invested in maintaining the status quo.” This paper endorses a growing chorus of calls for structural changes in university research, teaching, and service in order to respond to the CEE, drawing on a personal example to illuminate the challenges.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Lots of prayer, lots of emotional coaching, and pray it works out the best”: Tuning in to kids in a rural Appalachian community.

  Rural Mental Health · 2020 · 2 citations

  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Applied psychology

  Rural Americans face barriers in access to services such as psychoeducation programs. The purpose of this study was to describe how participants in a rural Appalachian community, a geographic location that has been largely underrepresented in the literature, responded to a psychoeducation program about parents’ facilitation of children’s emotional competence. The Tuning in to Kids (TiK) parent education program focuses on improving parents’ awareness of children’s emotions, their ability to promote children’s developing emotional competence, and the strength of the parent– child bond. This work has shown beneficial effects in Australia, yet research is scarce regarding implementation in the United States, particularly with rural populations. The TiK program was delivered in 2 groups of 6 sessions each, with 2 participants in the first group and 7 participants in the second group. To analyze session transcripts, we employed discourse analysis methods from multiple disciplines, including thematic coding, linguistic analysis, and sociocultural analysis. Overall, our interdisciplinary analysis allowed us to draw conclusions about unique ways that both participants and the facilitator contributed to group success. Key results included the emergence of 4 major themes: participants’ questioning/adopting TiK methods, parental support across participants, facilitator’s leveling the hierarchy, and facilitator self-disclosure. Findings support the utility of an interdisciplinary approach to examining parent education in rural Appalachia, a population that is underrepresented in the literature. Further, our findings support parents’ openness to psychoeducation in this community, as well the effectiveness of the facilitator’s integration of locally-relevant content throughout the program.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Economic Change and Perceptions of Health in Two Coalfield-Adjacent Appalachian Counties, circa 1950–2019

  Appalachian Journal · 2020-09-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Building Interdisciplinary Partnerships for Community-Engaged Environmental Health Research in Appalachian Virginia

  International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  This article describes a collaboration among a group of university faculty, undergraduate students, local governments, local residents, and U.S. Army staff to address long-standing concerns about the environmental health effects of an Army ammunition plant. The authors describe community-responsive scientific pilot studies that examined potential environmental contamination and a related undergraduate research course that documented residents' concerns, contextualized those concerns, and developed recommendations. We make a case for the value of resource-intensive university-community partnerships that promote the production of knowledge through collaborations across disciplinary paradigms (natural/physical sciences, social sciences, health sciences, and humanities) in response to questions raised by local residents. Our experience also suggests that enacting this type of research through a university class may help promote researchers' adoption of "epistemological pluralism", and thereby facilitate the movement of a study from being "multidisciplinary" to "transdisciplinary".

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Students Addressing Community Health Concerns near the Radford Army Ammunition Plant

  2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Teaching Region

  University Press of Kentucky eBooks · 2018-01-25

  book-chapterSenior author

  The final chapter in this book examines pedagogies of place. The seven authors discuss the pitfalls and promises of teaching regional studies in or on Appalachia, the South and Southwest, the Midwest, and New England as well as trans-regional Native American studies. They discuss whether and how region still matters to the students they encounter, what role they think region should play in contemporary social science and humanities pedagogy, and how they attempt to leverage interests in regional inequities and uneven geographic development to provoke student insights into other varieties of social injustice.

  PublisherDOI

• Mapping Appalachia’s Boundaries: Historiographic Overview and Digital Collection

  Journal of Appalachian Studies · 2018-04-01 · 5 citations

  article

  Abstract In this article, we offer a historiographical overview of major scholarly and political delineations of Appalachia from 1895 to the present alongside an online component that allows for an extensive virtual collection of historical maps as well as greater dynamism for user exploration.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Julia M. Gohlke

  4 shared

• Susan West Marmagas

  Virginia–Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine

  3 shared

• Dwight B. Billings

  3 shared

• Linsey C. Marr

  Virginia Tech

  3 shared

• Laura Hernández-Ehrisman

  2 shared

• Philip Joseph

  McMaster University

  2 shared

• Erika Hernández

  Binghamton University

  2 shared

• Katie Carmichael

  2 shared

Labs

• Department of Sociology, Virginia TechPI

Education

• PhD

  Emory University

  2005

Awards & honors

• Edward S. Diggs Endowed Professorial Chair in Humanities at…
• Weatherford Award for best nonfiction about Appalachia
• Phi Beta Kappa Sturm Award