Date Available

6-11-2013

Year of Publication

2013

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Graduate School

Department/School/Program

Sociology

Advisor

Dwight Billings

Abstract

In eastern Kentucky, as in much of central Appalachia, current local storylines narrate the frictions and contradictions involved in the structural transition from a post-WWII Fordist industrial economy and a Keynesian welfare state to a Post-Fordist service economy and Neoliberal hollow state, starving for energy to sustain consumer indulgence (Jessop, 1993; Harvey, 2003; 2005). Neoliberalism is the ideological force redefining the “societal infrastructure of language” that legitimates this transition, in part by redefining the key terms of democracy and citizenship, as well as valorizing the market, the individual, and technocratic innovation (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; Harvey, 2005). This project develops a perspective that understands cancer prevention and control in Appalachiaas part of the structural transition that is realigning community social ties in relation to ideological forces deployed as “commonsense” storylines that “lubricate” frictions that complicates the transition.

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