Mountain Blues & Water Gospel: How Affrilachian Women Cultivate Worlds in the Afterlives of Coal Extraction
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caine-micaine-mcp-dusp-2026-thesis.pdf
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Author(s)
Caine, Mica
Advisor(s)
Crockett, Karilyn
Date Issued
May 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Mountain Blues & Water Gospel:How Affrilachian Women Cultivate Worlds in the Afterlives of Coal Extraction is a media thesis that develops reconciliatory worldmaking as an artistic planning methodology for activating Black women’s memory, interpreting environmental damage, and imagining repair in the afterlives of coal extraction in Elkhorn Valley, West Virginia.The project begins with the land itself. The Appalachian Mountains were formed through collision, folding, burial, pressure, uplift, and erosion, while southern West Virginia’s coal seams were born from Carboniferous forests compressed across deep time. Along Elkhorn Creek and the Tug Fork watershed, Indigenous worlds preceded settler occupation. Later, coal operators and the Norfolk and Western Railway created the coalfield order, making extraction spatial through land control, mineral rights, rail corridors, opened seams, and company towns.In the decades after emancipation, Black migration into McDowell County marked a shift from enslaved labor and sharecropping toward wage labor in the coalfields. This thesis asks how reconciliatory worldmaking can function as a multimedia planning methodology for interpreting Black women’s practices of care, cultivation, and worldmaking, and how those practices might help us imagine repair. I approach this question as a descendant seeking wholeness and reconciliation with family, land, and memory.Grounded in Black feminist ethnographic practice, the thesis uses land relationality as its conceptual framework, reading mountain formation and watershed logics as interpretive strategies. Mountain formation logics describe coal’s extractive dominance through pressure, override, burial, rupture, and disordered time. Watershed logics situate Black women’s responses as counter-logics of flow, confluence, avulsion, and deposition.Through oral history, archival research, autoethnography, field observation, material culture, treasure hunting, folk art, and speculative fiction, this thesis constructs a coalfield counter-archive. Its media outputs include the Woods-Brown Family McDowell County Archive, a re-recording of “Rough Side of the Mountain,” a textile and family map, oral histories, film documentation, and the speculative world of Violette Ranger.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
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