In Appalachia Revisited, editors William Schumann and Rebecca Adkins Fletcher assemble an unusually diverse group of scholars and nonprofit practitioners to present a portrait of an intellectual, cultural, and political project in progress.

“We do not claim to present a comprehensive survey of contemporary topics, methods, or theories,” writes Schumann in the Introduction, “but we seek to contribute to emergent conversations about the coproductive roles of social and ecological communities, political and economic networks, and researchers in the making of Appalachian places” (18). A call for a renewed commitment to critical regionalism as a form of social invention, in which regional relationships are deliberately constructed to facilitate positive sociocultural ends, is embodied in different ways and to different extents in a broad-ranging set of individual essays. This multiplicity befits a project dedicated to what Adkins Fletcher describes in the Conclusion as “the unraveling of binary identities” and thus “the expansion of community, the widening of neighborhood, the increased potential for research, advocacy, and civic participation” (284).

The volume is constructed in four subsections: “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender,” “Language, Rhetoric, and Literacy,” “Economy and Environment,” and “Engagement.” (True to the emphasis on multiplicity, the Introduction offers several alternative schemata for subdividing the book's contents.) The opening section tackles questions both of racial and ethnic diversity in a place that the geographical imaginary holds to be homogeneous, and of “Appalachian” as an ethnic identity in itself. Individual essays may in some instances seem informed by relatively uncomplicated versions of identity as something that can be claimed, and upon which grievance against perceived cultural offense can be asserted, or (in Zeddy's essay on North Carolina political figure Louise Broyhill) as a birthright, where, regardless of the active role of the figure in relation to the region, Terman's work to relate Appalachian identity politics to questions of intersectionality suggests the potential for Appalachian-ness to both challenge and affirm contemporary critical discourses of race.

Questions of language and representation focus the second section, which is surprisingly brief for an academic project that often focusses on media and popular culture. Recognizing, perhaps, that the area is already well represented, the volume focusses instead on ethical questions of literacy research, digital evocations of community identity, and systematic analysis of speech practices. Hazen et al.’s “Continuity and Change of English Consonants in Appalachia” is an essay that exceeded the limits of my ability to read across disciplinary divides – a peril of trying to broadly represent the work of a truly transdisciplinary enterprise.

Part Three, “Economy and Environment,” takes a turn towards social science and public policy but could, in fact, also be considered a discussion of Appalachia as a concept with real rhetorical force. In pieces on fracking (Jahn) and the prison economy (Ooten and Sawyer), questions of the implications and consequences of the legacy of Appalachia's preterit status in the national imaginary move clearly to the fore: to what extent has the way we imagine this place authorized abuse of it? It's an old question in Appalachian studies, maybe the original question, but it turns now towards the injuries of a new economy. Meanwhile, essays on handicraft marketing (Kant-Byers) and neoliberal asset-based development (Puckett) both ask how else the region can present itself to the world in a way that can actually provide a living without commodifying a complicated, valuable history.

“Engagement,” the book's fourth and final section, deals with examples of Appalachian studies perspectives in action, rethinking the role of citizen participation in economic development, the guiding principles of alternative financial networks, the potential for oral-history research to resituate student perceptions of their own implication in regional life. All the chapters present situations in which the ability to think regionally, to map out the larger cultural spaces that intersect in a given site, has some useful application in dealing with the intricately situated problems of specific places. A call for a renewed dedication to participatory action research in regional studies (Piser) makes explicit what is tacit throughout: Appalachian studies, however it reconceives the region, retains a commitment to being a participant in as well as a proponent of regional public life.

If we don't get a unified theory of Appalachia, what we do get is a picture of Appalachian studies, especially its commitments to working in the spaces where academia meets its broadest possible publics. Appalachian studies is happening in housing programs and community centers, cultural festivals and support groups. When it finds a foothold in the academy, it's often in introductory programs, in action research, in spaces where broadening access to the resources of higher education is a tacit part of the mission. This volume's most important contribution may be its effort, in a time of erosion of public confidence in higher education, to revisit academia, as much as Appalachia.