Envisioning the Future of the Clearfork Valley

The Clearfork Valley is a rural, former coal-mining region along the Tennessee-Kentucky border, encompassing 12 unincorporated communities. In response to decades of extractive industry that exploited the region’s land and people, residents of the Valley have centered issues like community land ownership, climate resilience, and just transitions to new economies as they imagine a thriving community post-coal.

Building upon the history of community collaborative research in the Valley, AJRC affiliate faculty members Gabe Schwartzman (Geography & Sustainability) and Scottie McDaniel (Landscape Architecture) in partnership with the Woodland Community Land Trust and Clearfork Community Institute, have been working alongside residents to understand the community’s relationship to land and envision the region’s future.  

In Spring 2025, Schwartzman and McDaniel each led a section of the Appalachian Justice Research Lab, conducting a semester-long project with a team of interdisciplinary student researchers. Schwartzman’s project focused on documenting residents’ stories about the region and their connections to place through oral histories. In addition to conducting on-site interviews and gathering multimedia content, students learned and applied participatory media techniques from course co-instructor, Katie Mahalic (Cinema Studies), such as recording, editing, and producing audio narratives. McDaniel’s student team designed and implemented A.I.-driven workshops aimed at giving residents the opportunity to create narratives and visual imagery to reflect their visions for future land use in the Valley. The images created in these workshops were showcased at public events in the Clearfork Valley, at UT, and in a downtown Knoxville art gallery.  

As is the case for many projects that flow through the Appalachian Justice Research Lab, these short-term lab projects are just one piece of Schwartzman and McDaniel’s deep work in the region. For example, a clear outcome that emerged from McDaniel’s envisioning project was the ask from Clearfork Valley residents for the development of a plan for a shared “third space” in the community, guided by recurring elements in the A.I. images. In response, the School of Landscape Architecture launched a design charrette in Fall 2025, bringing together 55 students to reimagine a three-acre site currently serving as an asphalt parking lot. These students produced tangible design proposals to transform the underutilized, flood-prone lot into a multifunctional rural commons – with ideas that are both implementable and fundable for future work.  

Schwartzman’s research was also part of a public conversation, hosted by the AJRC and sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, in Spring 2026 about how power is shifting in rural communities, like the Clearfork Valley, due to changing economic and social conditions.