Shifting Power in Rural America: Conversations on Just Transitions
Tuesday, April 21
Jacobs Science Building, Room 321
4-5:30 panel conversation
5:30-6:30 reception featuring local foods
Featuring panelists Loka Ashwood, John Gaventa, Gabe Schwartzman, Shaunna Scott and Kathryn Engle.
Rural communities across the Appalachian region face new challenges and possibilities as a result of changing economic and political landscapes. The UK Appalachian Center & Appalachian Studies Program will host a public panel as part of a larger series to bring together John Gaventa and Loka Ashwood, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellows, for a conversation with Gabe Schwartzman (UT), Shaunna Scott (UK Sociology emeritus) and Kathryn Engle, UK Appalachian Center director.
Panelists will discuss recent research and publications including Gaventa and Schwartzman’s Power and Just Transitions: Struggles for a post-coal future in an Appalachian Valley, Scott and Engle’s co-edited collection Toward Just Transitions: Visions for Regenerative Communities in Appalachia, and Ashwood’s For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America. This conversation will explore shifting power and changing the conversation in the face of growing inequalities in rural Appalachia. Panelists will feature new and emerging projects and community efforts to build more just communities.
Join panelists for a reception afterwards featuring local Appalachian foods prepared by the Food Connection.
There will also be an opportunity to purchase recent books published by the panelists before and after the event.
This event is coordinated with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as part of the Defying Boundaries: MacArthur Fellows at 45 and cosponsored by the UK Appalachian Center & Appalachian Studies Program, Graduate Appalachian Research Community, Department of Sociology, Department of Geography, Committee on Social Theory, the Food Connection, Kentucky Climate Consortium and the Tracy Farmer Institute for Sustainability and the Environment.
Faculty Biographies
Loka Ashwood is a rural sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ashwood's research currently identifies the dominant public and private firms in global agribusiness and their cross-sectoral ties. She is working to make the findings accessible to the public. Ashwood is leveraging her collaborative research on the problems associated with corporate organizations to help identify new organizational strategies and forms that better serve communities for a richer social and ecological future. She wrote For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government is Losing the Trust of Rural America (Yale 2018) and is co-author of Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm (University of North Carolina 2023). Her work feeds into the Agricultural, Climate Rural and Environmental Justice Initiative.
John Gaventa is a political sociologist and engaged scholar. Gaventa's most recent work focuses on the impact of the decline of the coal industry in rural Appalachia, including the recent book with Gabe Schwartzman Power and Just Transitions: Struggles for a post-coal future in an Appalachian Valley (January 2026). This work is a sequel to his earlier 1982 award winning book on Power and Powerlessness in an Appalachian Valley. Gaventa is a professor at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK, and over the last 50 years he has written widely on issues of power, citizen action and social justice.
Gabe Schwartzman is a human geographer who studies economic development and environmental politics. His research focuses on rural economic transitions and the social implications of decarbonization and is co-author with Gaventa of the new book Power and Just Transitions (see above.) He studies the human dimensions of forest carbon offset regimes in Central Appalachia and a second project studying peasant livelihoods, protected areas, and deforestation in the Terra do Meio, Pará. His scholarship contributes to the fields of political ecology, development studies, and studies of race and gender. He considers how the social outcomes of rural economic transitions in an era of climate politics speak to debates within these fields of study.
Shaunna L. Scott is associate professor emeritus of sociology and former director of Appalachian studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Two Sides to Everything: The Cultural Construction of Class Consciousness in Harlan County, Kentucky and coeditor of Studying Appalachian Studies: Making the Path by Walking. Her recent co-edited volume, Toward Just Transitions: Visions for Regenerative Communities in Appalachia was published in fall 2025.
Kathryn Engle is director of the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. She serves on the board of the Lend-A-Hand Center in Walker, Kentucky, and is a founding board member of the Knox County Farmers' Market. She works with the Sunup Initiative in Corbin, Kentucky. Engle is the editor of Madison's Heritage Rediscovered: Stories from a Historic Kentucky County and co-editor of the recently released Toward Just Transitions: Visions for Regenerative Communities in Appalachia.