The 2022 Doctoral Symposium was held on Friday November 11th and Saturday November 12th via zoom. This year’s theme was “The Ground Under Your Feet” and included two keynote presentations.
Friday, Doctoral Program alum and world-renowned poet, Dr. Adrian Rice hosted his keynote presentation entitled “The Poet's Place: From Belfast to Boone, or There and Back Again." Dr. Rice grew up in the Rathcoole Housing Estate, near Belfast, Northern Ireland, amid the “Troubles” which roiled his country. Witness to violence and deep social division, Dr. Rice writes from an internal place of deep compassion for his neighbors, and a place of relentless hope in the possibility of peace. Dr. Rice will always be an Irish poet, even as he’s become a poet and teacher of this place. Since traveling to Western North Carolina years ago, he’s made Boone and Hickory his home, playing music on the front porch, advocating for the arts, and teaching through poetry in First-Year seminar courses here at Appalachian.
Saturday’s keynote presentation, entitled “Memories of Junaluska: Three Generations of Life in This Place,” was hosted by Roberta Jackson (mother), Lynn Patterson (daughter), and Alana Patterson (granddaughter). During the Symposium, they were able to share and reflect on their experiences of living in the Junaluska community. The book “Junaluska: Oral Histories of a Black Appalachian Community” was selected for the Common Reading Program at Appalachian State as the 2022–23 book selection for the incoming class of first-year and transfer students. This book is a collective ethnography of the Junaluska community, including the history of African-American schools and racialized spaces in Boone.
The 2022 Alice P. Naylor Award was presented to Dr. Laura Shears for their dissertation entitled “The Teaching and Practice of the "Yoga Body": A Poststructural, Queercrip Analysis of Yoga Education in the United States.”