Rural Environmental Justice: Structural Inequities and Care-Driven Resistance in Grundy County, Tennessee

Abstract

Rural communities and populations have played a prominent role in the Environmental Justice Movement and have appeared within environmental justice scholarship. However, rurality, as a critical axis of difference—a socially constructed dimension of identity and place through which power, resources, and recognition are unevenly distributed—is an understudied dimension of environmental (in)justice. In response to this gap, a small but growing body of scholarship has begun to advance conceptual frameworks for understanding rural environmental (in)justice. These frameworks have identified unique mechanisms that contribute to and perpetuate rural communities’ vulnerability to environmental injustice. Contributing to this body of scholarship, this dissertation employs a case study approach, situated within the context of Grundy County, Tennessee—a rural county in South Central Appalachia—to examine the structural mechanisms (i.e., economic, political, and social) that contribute to the county’s vulnerability to environmental injustice. However, recognizing that rural communities are not passive recipients of environmental harm, it also explores how Grundy County residents mobilize collective action in response to environmental threats. To examine these topics, I draw on 24 months of fieldwork, guided by a methodological orientation rooted in critical inquiry. This approach employs a multimodal ethnographic methodology that includes participant observation, the collection of extant documents (i.e., historical, archival, social media, and news media), and in-depth interviews. I integrate these methods through a constructivist grounded theory approach, which recognizes knowledge as socially constructed and contextually situated. Informed by theoretical frameworks of spatial justice, environmental justice, and a feminist ethics of care, findings from this dissertation suggest that Grundy County’s vulnerability to environmental injustice is rooted in intersecting political, economic, and social processes that operate unevenly across space. Patterns of economic disinvestment, fragmented governance, and rural stigmatization have rendered the county politically marginalized and environmentally expendable. However, despite these structural conditions, residents do not passively accept harm; they engage in diverse forms of collective action rooted in an ethic of care and guided by situated practices of care that contest environmental injustices, defend a collective understanding of “home,” and enact place-based strategies of mutual responsibility, resilience, and pride of place.