The Boiled Down Juice

This very important film was produced out of Appalshop’s hiphop radio program, Holler to the Hood.
The film synopsis reads:

Up the Ridge is a one-hour television documentary produced by Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby. In 1999 Szuberla and Kirby were volunteer DJ’s for the Appalachian region’s only hip-hop radio program in Whitesburg, KY when they received hundreds of letters from inmates transferred into nearby Wallens Ridge, the region’s newest prison built to prop up the shrinking coal economy. The letters described human rights violations and racial tension between staff and inmates. Filming began that year and, though the lens of Wallens Ridge State Prison, the program offers viewers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving hundreds of thousands of inner-city minority offenders to distant rural outposts. The film explores competing political agendas that align government policy with human rights violations, and political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict with tragic consequences. Connections exist, in both practice and ideology, between human rights violations in Abu Ghraib and physical and sexual abuse recorded in American prisons.
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Rethinking Globalization:Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World textbook

I just read about this textbook from Rethinking Schools. It was published in 2002. This resource textbook teaches students 4th-12th grades social justice issues as an interconnected web. As the authors say in the introduction (which can be found online as well), (more…)

I just read this article in Dollars and Sense magazine. It discusses Agrentina’s experiment with job creation while also exploring the possibilities of the Employer of last Resort Proposal, a government job plan somewhat similar to the WPA. Although much explored, public folklore’s deep roots with the WPA has always inspired and interested me. I wonder what models for our own work can be found in the WPA and the murals, archives, and books they left behind? Sure it was a flawed program. But flawed models are still models and they can be used and rethought. Mistakes can be learned from. Similarly, the Employer of Last Resort Proposal seems to be something folklorists should know more about– a key economic issue for those of us working at the intersection of local economies and cultural production.
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