Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6178-6551
Abstract
During the summer of 2023, I conducted a study in rural Rabun County, Georgia, with a cohort of high school students as they worked to create a magazine focused on Appalachian culture. The magazine, known as Foxfire, has been published since 1966 by rural high school students who were led by writing teachers. In its heyday, the Foxfire Magazine was seen as a bastion of critical education, as its teachers and founder implemented Deweyan pedagogy and asked students to critically reflect on issues of rural Southern Appalachian culture in their writing. The Foxfire Magazine was wildly successful, resulting in a series of books based on the magazine's content that eventually generated enough revenue to open a museum focused on Appalachian history. Currently, the Foxfire Museum hosts local high school students each summer as they produce the magazine under the guidance of teachers and volunteers. My role in this throughout the summer was as a researcher as well as a volunteer with the Foxfire leadership program. Throughout this this article, I draw on Chanon Adsanatham's (2019) framework of queer methodology in order to examine the ways in which the learning community of the Foxfire cohort created a space for critical education. Through taking an autoethnographic approach, I apply Adsanatham's heuristic to my own experiences of researching in Rabun County as a queer Appalachian from Kentucky.
Methodological Approach
Qualitative
DOI
https://doi.org/10.60808/7b62-m641
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Boling, B. (2026). Queer Methods and Rural Education: Studying the Foxfire Program. Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.60808/7b62-m641
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Included in
Education Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons
