The 2024 UK Graduate Appalachian Research Symposium & Arts Showcase will be held March 2, 2024, presented by the UK Appalachian Center and Appalachian Studies Program and UK’s Graduate Appalachian Research Community (GARC).

See full Call for Proposals. Abstracts due Friday, February 9: 2024 Abstract Submission Form.

The Symposium is open to undergrad and graduate students of all disciplines from all colleges and universities doing work pertaining to Appalachia. Registration is free for both presenters and attendees. The Symposium is intended to foster a supportive community in which students from various fields can present their Appalachian-based research and creative work. This year’s Symposium will provide an opportunity for students to network, collaborate, learn from each other’s findings, and explore issues relevant to Appalachian communities. Students creating performance or visual artworks related to Appalachia are strongly encouraged to participate.

This year's theme is Just Futures. While Appalachia is often imagined as mired intractably in the past, our focus on just futures was chosen to envision together what just Appalachian futures might look like. Attention to just futures provides an opportunity to bring together transdisciplinary work on social justice and equity across disciplines, including environmental studies, medicine and public health, life and physical sciences, the social sciences and humanities, and more, and interrogate broadly what justice looks like and what it means for different people and in different contexts. Through exploration of interdisciplinary research and arts, the Symposium will exhibit how different groups have imagined just futures within the region, resisting singular constructions of Appalachia and stagnant regional representations to present the complex, engaging, and ever-evolving understandings of what it means to be Appalachian and live and work in the region. We call upon participants to engage with questions of justice, futurity, and time, confront regional stereotypes, and consider what a just future might look like. What would it mean to imagine and create just futures for Appalachians?

Questions should be directed to ukgarc@gmail.com.