This project examines the factors influencing youth retention in Morgan County, TN through direct engagement with key stakeholders. Guided by Dr. Janine Al-Aseer (Theory & Practice in Teacher Education), students conduct structured listening sessions with educational leaders and community representatives while also facilitating discussions with young adults about their lived experiences and future trajectories. With support from the Morgan County Community Vibrancy group, students conduct qualitative interviews, analyze data, and assess the broader social and economic impacts on individuals and communities. Project deliverables will include a presentation with community partners of the information and a data report for the community.

In collaboration with the Appalachian Rekindling Project, Appalachian Land Study Collective, and Building Community Not Prisons Coalition, this project – led by Dr. Lindsay Shade (Sociology) – researches the role of land ownership in the increasing number of rural prisons, especially in previously mined areas. Students engage with community land use planning for land recently acquired by the Appalachian Rekindling Project (a region-wide initiative led by Native women) to rematriate land at the site of a proposed federal prison on a former strip mine. Students also learn about and research the history of land ownership and extraction in the region, as well as the role of land governance in efforts to transition away from extractive systems. Project activities include collaboration with community organizations, formerly incarcerated individuals and their families, artists, and legal experts to review responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, land records, and newspaper archives, as well as creation of public materials, comparative policy analysis, and research papers. The project team will develop an interactive website and mapping tool to share our findings publicly.

Students working on this project, led by Dr. Nikki Luke (Geography & Sustainability), partner with Jobs with Justice of East Tennessee (JwJET) to understand strategies to secure local investment from energy and infrastructure projects in Tennessee. JwJET is working as part of a statewide coalition on an industrial democracy project that was started to empower workers in Tennessee to develop pathways towards good jobs and community benefits associated with clean energy and infrastructure investments in the state. Students will collect and analyze data on current and planned clean energy and infrastructure projects in Tennessee; document how public investment is used to support these projects; and engage in a legal, landscape analysis to evaluate mechanisms deployed across the U.S. to secure community benefit and good neighbor agreements on infrastructure projects. The project team will develop practicable tools to communicate opportunities for infrastructure projects and ensure worker safety, engagement, and responsiveness to worker and community concerns. 

This project is a collaboration with Hellbender Harm Reduction, which is led by community researcher and Hellbender executive director Dr. Lesly-Marie Buer, to examine access to medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) during pregnancy in Appalachia. Students engage in an analysis of patient, provider, and pharmacist rights and responsibilities in relation to MOUD access, prescribing, and distribution. The project will focus on a phone audit that examines the practices of pharmacists in filling, or refusing to fill, prescriptions for the MOUD medication buprenorphine during pregnancy. Hellbender Harm Reduction has requested several deliverables, including a publishable paper and more accessible community fact sheets discussing findings for a variety of audiences, including people who use drugs, harm reduction providers, prescribers, and pharmacists. 

This project, led by Professor Scottie McDaniel (Landscape Architecture), focused on using A.I. software to support Appalachian communities impacted by resource extraction. Students designed and implemented an A.I.-driven workshop aimed at giving residents in the Clearfork Valley of Tennessee the opportunity to create narratives and visual imagery to reflect their visions for future land use. The images created in this workshop were showcased at public events in the Clearfork Valley, at UT, and in a downtown Knoxville art gallery. This included large-scale versions of the images, as well as postcard-size images that community members could take with them. Another clear outcome emerged from this envisioning project: Clearfork Valley residents asked that recurring ideas from the images be developed into a plan for a shared “third space” in the community. 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.

Students working on this project, led by Dr. Vivian Swayne (Sociology), joined a digital research collaborative of artists, scholars, curators, and organizers who work to preserve and amplify social movement art. This collaborative hosts Abolition Now: Images for Study and Struggle, a digitally curated, searchable, and open-source database that documents the recent unprecedented flow of social movement art. The platform includes thousands of images, video vignettes, educational commentary, artist and concept study guides, a submission portal, and user guides to empower people to build their own digital exhibit or archive. With a particular focus on the Appalachian South, students working on this project were trained in content generation, coding metadata, visual and thematic analysis, interview skills, and video production. Students contributed art by Appalachian artists to the database, built study guides for these artists, and conducted interviews which they edited and produced as video vignettes. All of these images and videos were showcased at a public exhibit at UT and will continue to live on the AN website.

Students working on this project, led by Dr. Gabe Schwartzman (Geography & Sustainability), explored the pressing issue of heirs’ property in rural Tennessee through the lens of oral histories. Partnering with the Woodland Community Land Trust and Clearfork Community Institute in northeast Tennessee, students engaged deeply with local landowners, conducting oral history interviews that illuminate the personal, historical, and cultural significance of heirs’ property—land passed down through generations without clear titles, often leaving owners vulnerable to land loss and economic stagnation. These stories, which will be archived at the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center Oral History Project, are part of a larger UT Grand Challenges project seeking to resolved heirs’ property issues in the Clearfork Valley, which could serve as a template for other rural communities as well.

In collaboration with League of Women Voters of Knoxville-Knox County and the Voter Turnout Coalition, and led by Dr. Meghan Conley (Sociology), students engaged young people in Knoxville in critical conversations about democracy using deep canvassing methods to better understand how young people think democracy, investigate why they do or do not engage, and support young people’s sense of self-efficacy to create change through democratic participation. Deep canvassing is a conversation methodology that uses compassion, curiosity, and storytelling to help people process internal conflicts and move towards empathy, understanding, and action on complex issues. The data from these conversations was compiled into an array of visual and interactive elements – maps, quilts, graphs, stories, photos – and showcased in an exhibit at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville.

Students led by Professor Wendy Bach (Law) and Dr. Kyra Martinez (Sociology) partnered with Community Defense of East Tennessee (CDET) to investigate legal charges of shoplifting, burglary, and theft in the region. After learning about widespread use of shoplifting charges at a Walmart in Sullivan County, Tennessee, the research team collected and analyzed data on shoplifting and retail theft, including the nature and level of legal charges, the range and scope of punishment; the role of retail companies, root causes of theft, and overall impacts on individuals and the community. Data collection involved multiple trips to Sullivan County to collect and review case files and to interview public defenders and other stakeholders. CDET and students created “zines” outlining the scope of the problem, the research findings and resources, to be disbursed to Tennesseans who have or may be navigating Tennessee’s retail theft laws.

In collaboration with co-researchers in the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (EBCI), students led by Dr. Michelle Brown (Sociology) developed a violence reduction tool focused on domestic violence in its immediate aftermath, with strategies for long term safety planning. This tool is grounded in the structural and cultural contexts specific to the needs of the EBCI, and it will be used to support decision-making in the context of intimate partner violence arrests and prosecutions. To develop the tool, students engaged in listening sessions with key EBCI departments and community organizations; worked closely with scholars, organizers, and people who have survived and committed violence to identify best practices in violence intervention; engaged in a legal analysis of sovereignty, tribal law, and its intersections with US law; and reviewed research on domestic violence risk assessment and violence intervention/interruption models. The research team will produce a report on the creation of the tool, and the EBCI will begin to pilot the tool.

Led by Dr. Solange Muñoz (Geography & Sustainability) and in partnership with Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM), students researched housing access with a focus on the case study of Knoxville, TN. Students examined the legal, political, private, and civic institutions and organizations that impact the housing crisis in Knoxville, and explored how these state and local structures and conditions have both contributed to the housing crisis and impact opportunities to solve and/or mitigate its effects. The research team produced a report – “Housing Stability and Tenant Representation in a Changing Knoxville” – which details the scope of Knox County’s eviction crisis and presents data that demonstrates the economic efficiency of investment in Legal Aid of East Tennessee’s (LAET) eviction prevention program