University of Bergen

Appalachia is a cultural region in the United States that stretches from the southern parts of New York State to Alabama and Mississippi in the South. It has an approximate population of 23 million, and is also the fieldwork scene for my ongoing doctoral project.
          Apart from having some of the most poverty stricken rural areas in the US, the Appalachian Mountains have, in several subsequent waves, been the prime target for dissidents who have opted out of state society in search for autonomy and self-reliance.
          Motivated in part by a firm belief in the immanent collapse of society, a notable, yet decentralized, milieu has retreated up in the mountainous regions of South Central Appalachia (VA, NC, SC, TN). They claim the future of humanity to be fundamentally dependant on the last blots of remaining wilderness, and seek a primordial reconnection not primarily to nature, but to the wild. The remaining wilderness is also envisioned to constitute the foundation for future human existence in the «after-times».
          Through their utopian activity, sometimes glossed as rewilding techniques, the participants are seeking to reconnect to nature and the wild, create new nature-centred spiritualities, novel subjectivities and a sociality that peeks beyond the limits of what we know as «modern industrial civilization».     

Previous research interests in The Carolinas revolved around the nexus of agency, subjectivity construction, «self-formation» and political participation by ethical practice.