9 am presentations

The Color of Justice: Segregation in the US and South Africa

by Matthew Robinson

This presentation will outline how skin color (i.e., race) has impacted justice in the US (with a special focus on the southern United States) and the Republic of South Africa. The focus is on segregation, and the presenter illustrates similarities and differences between the two countries in terms of how identities associated with skin color impacted the practice of segregation in both countries. Emphasis is placed on the laws and institutions used to discriminate against people of color over the passage of time. Note that the focus of this presentation is on treatment of Blacks, specifically, with limited commentary on other populations (e.g., Native Americans in the US, “Coloreds” and Indians in South Africa). The presentation will identify the purposes of segregation in each country, rooted in theories of racial discrimination.

International Mountain to Mountain Partnerships at Appalachian State University

by Katherine Ledford

This presentation will highlight the long tradition of partnerships between Appalachian State University and other universities and community organizations around the world that draw on our common locations in and research about mountainous areas. I will begin by describing the role of the Center for Appalachian Studies and the Appalachian studies program in pioneering mountain to mountain connections with Wales beginning in the early 2000s; progressing through the relationships developed with colleagues in the Andes, the Carpathians, and the Alps; outlining the International Mountain Studies Symposium that we held on our campus in 2019; summarizing current connections between our university and the University of the Free State's Afromontane Research Unit in South Africa and the University of Innsbruck's American Studies Department; and concluding with projections for Appalachian State University's role in the developing field of mountain humanities studies.

Destination Management Across the World: My 2021-2022 Virtual Initiative Program

by Susan Weidmann

In the fall of 2021, I submitted a proposal for the Virtual Initiative Program, entitled Destination Management Across the World. The goal of the program was three-fold:

• To foster cross-cultural communication and experiences between students in my senior seminar in tourism class and students at two European universities.

• To investigate the strategies (and effectiveness of those strategies) used to manage destinations in a variety of locations across the world, and then sharing our findings with the other students via a variety of virtual platforms.

• To strengthen some of our relationships with international partner institutions.

The project was funded by the Office of International Education and Development and executed during the spring of 2022 semester. The presentation will summarize the process I undertook to initiate this program, finding partner institutions and appropriate faculty and courses within those institutions, how the semester and project unfolded, lessons learned, and plans for the future.

Waking the Hirschfeld: An Oral and Archival History of a Dublin LGBTQ Center

by Maria Pramaggiore

This project, launched in 2022 by researchers from Appalachian State University (Maria Pramaggiore, IDS) and University College Dublin (Páraic Kerrigan), examines the impact of Dublin’s Hirschfeld Center on LGBTQ individuals and communities, and Irish society more broadly, during the time of its primary operation (1979-88) and in the ensuing decades. We aim to document and understand the ways the Center, an ephemeral queer institution and social space, has been both remembered and forgotten. To achieve these goals, we are collecting and analyzing oral testimonies from a range of individuals with knowledge about and/or experience of the Hirschfeld. We will also access and interpret physical and digital material from historical archives. This project will produce a book, Disco Liberation?, under contract with Liverpool UP and a limited podcast series, Fortress Fownes.

From "angry mobs" to "citizens in anguish": The international news coverage of the 2021 US Capitol attack

by Volha Kananovich

The presentation will feature the findings of a research project that was supported by an Undergraduate Research Assistantship from the Appalachian State University Office of Student Research in the Fall 2021 semester.

Past research has shown that the news coverage of protest movements in domestic news media tends to be characterized by language that marginalizes protesters by devaluing their causes and focusing on the disruptive aspects of their actions—a pattern known as “protest paradigm.” However, a growing number of recent studies has been calling on communication scholars to undertake cross-national projects that involve nations outside of the country where the protests are happening. Such cross-national studies should make it possible to reveal factors that may affect the media coverage of protests but cannot be captured in traditional studies, which focus on one country. This study answers this call.

This project tested the robustness of the “protest paradigm” by examining the news coverage of the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack in eight countries that vary in the nature of their political regime and geopolitical standing, with democratic U.S. allies United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Australia on one side, and authoritarian adversaries Russia, China, and Iran on the other. Based on a computer-assisted analysis of 3,579 news articles, the study showed that rather than operating as a rigid template, the protest paradigm offers national media a malleable set of journalistic devices that can be appropriated to construct the meaning of disruptive global events in a way that reproduces dominant domestic ideologies and advances the ruling elites’ geopolitical interests.