Co-Founders and Center Co-Directors Wendy A. Bach and Michelle Brown

Appalachian Justice Research Center co-founders and co-directors, Wendy A. Bach (College of Law) and Michelle Brown (College of Arts & Sciences, Sociology), spent three years visioning and planning for the Center prior to its inception in spring 2024. Born out of ongoing community requests for research support and collaboration, Bach and Brown saw the unique capacity of the university to meet these community-articulated needs.

Wendy and I had been doing this work for a while in community spaces, and we had been thinking about both our research and our pedagogy in those spaces. We kept finding each other and other people from campus doing this work in the community, and we also saw a deep resonance with our students when they could access that kind of work. So out of that, we just started dreaming. —Michelle Brown

Co-leading a course called “Visions of Justice Practicum” in Spring 2022 – which, combined with Bach’s experience teaching clinical legal education, would lay the groundwork for the Appalachian Justice Research Lab – the two researchers saw first-hand the impacts community collaborative work had on their students.

A number of our students said, I’ve been educated in this region throughout my career, and I’ve never been in a classroom where the central focus is where I come from. One of the most beautiful things we saw is that our students were both students and teachers. They learn how professionals use their expertise together across disciplines to solve problems. That’s what we’re supposed to be educating them to do. —Wendy A. Bach

Together with faculty across the UT system – and alongside other programs with deep roots in community – the creation of the AJRC as a space for cross-discipline, community-driven research with and for Central Appalachian communities has been a labor of love.

This is the work that matters. I think a lot of this is about showing up over and over in spaces where need is real. We want the work we do at UT to provide the infrastructure and the pipeline for that kind of work. These are real issues and problems in the region that people define as intractable. We don’t think they are. —Michelle Brown

Meet our Collaborators