ACTC associate professor contributes to text book

Aug. 7, 2018

 

     Laura Tussey, associate professor and program coordinator for Ashland Community and Technical College’s Appalachian studies program, was recently published in a text book about female faculty members in higher education, specifically in Appalachia.
     “The Feminist Alliance Project in Appalachia: Minoritized Experiences of Women Faculty and Administrators in Higher Education” illustrates the minoritized experiences of women faculty and administrators in higher education and highlights Appalachia as a geographic and cultural region, a sector in academia that still remains relatively ignored in mainstream feminist studies. The book is based on autobiographical and autoethnographic narratives of diverse women who discuss their similar and unique forms of oppression as students and as professionals in the academic workplace within Appalachia.
     “When ACTC hosted the Tristate Diversity Conference in 2016, I was part of a round-table discussion panel on minoritized women in Appalachia,” Tussey said. “Alicia Chavira-Prado, Nancy Preston and I struck up a conversation outside our session about our experiences in higher education, the struggles to get there, and our experiences.”
     Chavira-Prado, special assistant to the vice provost for diversity and inclusion at Ohio University, is the volume author and editor of the text. Preston is the director of Morehead State University at Ashland. Other co-authors are Dina Lopez, professor of geological science at Ohio University; Ellen Belchior Rodrigues, independent scholar; Chantel Weisenmuller, assistant professor at the West Virginia University School of Medicine; and Linda Koenig, clinical and chemical dependency counselor at Shawnee State University.
     “We discovered there were many commonalities in our stories despite our socioeconomic and cultural differences,” Tussey said. “Our book project grew from there with Alicia as the driving force, coordinating and editing our anthology. I feel it is a solid work.”
     The narratives in the book support the claim that white and nonwhite women experience similar minoritization within specific junctures of space, gender and other identities. They show the need to be allies in recognizing and opposing all women’s minoritization in order to end women’s oppression.
     The book is published through Peter Lang International Academic Publisher and can be purchased as an ebook on peterlang.com. It is also available in hardcover on Amazon.com.