The Appalachian Justice Research Center (AJRC) is a transdisciplinary research and training collaborative dedicated to advancing community visions for a more just and equitable Appalachia and Mountain South.

The AJRC leverages university resources to address urgent, protracted, and historically under-addressed issues in the expansive region. The Center accomplishes this through a community-driven, non-extractive research model. Our projects will be centered around community priorities and legacies of resilience, specifically those communities most impacted by histories of poverty and violence. The first wave of research projects will focus on such topics as community safety, housing and community stability, and health and land justice in Appalachia. The Center will utilize an innovative teaching methodology, which will include a core community justice lab modeled on clinical legal education, where students work in small groups with faculty from different disciplines on specific justice-related problems. The Lab will bring advanced undergraduates as well as law, professional, and graduate students from across campus into the same classroom space around community projects for the first time at UT. A new Justice Studies interdisciplinary program, developed collaboratively between the College of Law and College of Arts and Sciences, including over 200 courses from across campus, will house the AJRC’s curriculum. Combining policy development and advocacy, the AJRC will work towards producing tangible solutions to seemingly intractable problems in rural and urban Appalachian communities. Our work will include the creation of community archives and oral histories, and curricula and media platforms, as well as standard research outputs, such as research white papers, articles, and books.

The impetus behind the AJRC is directly aligned with the University’s land-grant mission. That mission, dating back to legislative acts of the 18th century, was to address challenges, such as food security and farming, community infrastructure, and critical thinking skills essential to democracy, by teaching subjects like agriculture, engineering, and a core liberal arts education, not just to the privileged few, but also regional members of the working class. The AJRC extends these missions by bringing transdisciplinary constituents together to pursue and provide coordinated research support to historically under-addressed community issues in Tennessee, Appalachia and the Mountain South. Furthermore, the AJRC pursues this work through engaged, collaborative research that is attuned to the complex inequalities and injustices of the region. The AJRC is committed to community collaborative and participatory research approaches that take poor, marginalized communities seriously on their own terms. In this way, we have the potential and objective to serve as a regional hub and national model for this type of engaged community-collaborative research, teaching, and learning. The AJRC’s vision, goals, and strategies are all wedded to this collaborative, transdisciplinary process.