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Chapter 7 provides a transition between Part I and Part II of the book, beginning with a summary of the four factors described in Part I that were found to inhibit local residents’ participation in the Central Appalachian environmental justice movement. The chapter then describes how Part II will present a “Photovoice” project that was initiated with non-activist coalfield residents to study, in real time, the processes hindering and facilitating local involvement in the environmental justice movement.

Chapter 8 provides a rational for using the feminist participatory action research method of Photovoice as a means of creating a more complete picture of “non-action in the face of injustice.” Through recruiting 54 women living in five coal-mining communities for an eight-month Photovoice project, a micromobilization context was created to study the factors that facilitate and hinder the process of “becoming an activist.” Forty-seven of the recruited participants had no prior involvement in environmental justice activism, while seven of the participants (one or two in each of the groups) were associated in some way with one of the local organizations fighting irresponsible coal industry practices in the region. The chapter presents how this project was organized, how the five communities were selected, how the 54 women were recruited, how the meetings were run, and what data were collected throughout the 8-month project and beyond. Descriptions of each of the five communities and the demographics of the participants are also included in this chapter.

Chapter 9 presents the story of what transpired in each of the five communities during the Photovoice project. It describes the significant events and micro-level interactions that took place during the Photovoice meetings and in the larger communities, providing an analysis of how those events and interactions influenced the likelihood that group members would publicly acknowledge their concerns about coal industry practices or become involved in environmental justice activism. This chapter provides important insight into the power dynamics in these small communities and the ways in which an “outsider stigma” can be applied to certain individuals–even local residents–as a way of discrediting their grievances about coal industry practices. This chapter also describes the way in which a number of the Photovoice participants who had expressed unhappiness with coal industry practices chose not to directly advocate for changes to the coal industry but instead decided to become involved in “non-contentious advocacy issues,” community problems–like poor road conditions or litter–that did not challenge the power structure but still gave these residents the satisfaction of taking action on behalf of their communities.

There were five non-activist Photovoice participants who, during the course of the Photovoice project, became involved with the environmental justice movement. Chapter 10 reveals the events and interactions that led to these women’s participation in the movement, and, in the cases of three of the five women, how their personal networks, coupled with the changing collective identity of the movement, eventually caused their disassociation from the environmental justice organizations with which they had aligned themselves during the project. This chapter reveals how the influx of non-locals into the movement, the involvement of celebrities, and the high-profile protest tactics they used prompted these women and others in their community to feel a disconnect between their own personal identities and the collective identity of the social movement (i.e. a lack of “identity correspondence”). This chapter reveals how, despite the local origins of the movement and the fact that local residents are still at the center of the struggle, there is a perception among many in the coalfields that the environmental justice movement is a movement of outsiders. This chapter argues that this perception may have damaging consequences for environmental justice groups’ ability to recruit new local participants into the movement.