Critical Studies of Southern Place

William M. Reynolds received his Ed.D. in curriculum theory from the University of Rochester. Dr. Reynolds teaches in the Department of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading at Georgia Southern University. He has authored, co-authored, edited, and co-edited numerous books including Curriculum: A River Runs Through It (2003); Expanding Curriculum Theory: Dispositions and Lines of Flight (2004); The Civic Gospel: A Political Cartography of Christianity (2009); and A Curriculum of Place: Understandings Emerging Through the Southern Mist (2013). He has also published many articles and chapters on issues of curriculum and cultural studies.

Critical Studies of Southern Place: A Reader critically investigates and informs the construction of Southernness, Southern identity, and the South past and present. It promotes and expands the notion of a Southern epistemology. Authors from across the South write about such diverse topics as Southern working-class culture; LGBT issues in the South; Southern music; Southern reality television; race and ethnicity in the South; religion in the South; sports in the South; and Southernness. How do these multiple interpretations of popular culture within critical conceptualizations of place enhance our understandings of education? Critical Studies of Southern Place investigates the connections between the critical examination of place-specific culture and its multiple connections with education and pedagogy. This important book fills a significant gap in the scholarly work on the ramifications of place. Readers will be able to center the importance of place in their own scholarship and cultural work as well as be able to think deeply about how Southern place affects us all.

Critical Studies of Southern Place: A Reader critically investigates and informs the construction of Southernness, Southern identity, and the South past and present. Authors from across the South write about such diverse topics as Southern working-class culture; LGBT issues in the South; Southern music; Southern reality television; race and ethnicity in the South; religion in the South and more.

Contents: William M. Reynolds: Preface: Old Times There are Not Forgotten - Jennifer Beech: The Pedagogic Function of Work(ing-Class) Stories: An Exploration of Culture in the Deep South - Faith Agostinone-Wilson: Class Warfare: You'd Better Redneckognize - Randall Hewitt: Southern Satellite - Frank G. Jordan Jr.: Policing in the Heat of Hypermasculinity: The Blue Polyester Curriculum and the Critical Education of a Southern Cop - Henry A. Giroux: Drowning Democracy: The Media, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Hurricane Katrina - William M. Reynolds: Redneck Piece of White Trash: Southern Rebels and Music: Epistemologies of Class, Masculinity, and Race Identity - Robert Lake: Diddley Bows, Cross Harps, Banjars and Backbeats: The Rhythm and Sound of Personal Agency from Southern African America - Lalenja Harrington: Banjos and Shit: Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge and the «Hermeneutics of Minstrelsy» - Tricia M. Kress: «Why Do They All Have 'Powers'?» De/Constructing Southern «Otherness» in True Blood - Wayne Partridge: The Averted Gaze: Representations of Race and the American South in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction - Eleanor Blair: Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Moonshiners, and Duck Dynasty: The Intersection of Popular Culture and a Southern Place - Karen C. Collier: Dirt Roads and Narrow Minds: Visual Media's Queering of the American South - Mark Vicars: Subaltern Desires: Queer (in) Southern Story Lines: Looking at Movies and the Queering of/in the South - David P. Owen, Jr.: Duck Dynasty Is a TV Show: The Outdoors and Southern Identity - David M. Callejo Pérez: In the Shadows of the New South: Latinos and Modern Southern Apartheid - Derrick M. Tennial: Don't Ask, Don't Tell: The Unspoken Policy of the African American Church in the South - Karen Anijar-Appleton: Paula Deen and Those Days of White Magnolias with Bitter Tea - Theodorea Regina Berry: Reimagining Race: Teaching and Learning in an Urban Southern Elementary School - P. L. Thomas: Educated and Educating in the Post-Civil Rights-Era South: A Critical Memoir - Brandon L. Sams: Reasons for Moving: Reading Lessons from Southern-Sacred Textuality - Consuela Ward: Purgatory's Place in the South: A Black Woman's Journey from Church to the Promised Land - Shirley R. Steinberg: Treasures and Ghosts: In the South, Nothing Is Just Black and White - Donald R. Livingston/Sharon M. Livingston: Yes Sir, Yes Ma'am, and the Ritual of Spanking: The Curriculum of Respect in the South - Leila E. Villaverde/Roymieco A. Carter/Dana M. Stachowiak: Visual Landscapes, Literacies, and Place: The South (Re)seen - Douglas McKnight: Of Time and River: How Place Racialized My Course in Life - Mark Helmsing: Grotesque Stories, Desolate Voices: Encountering Histories and Geographies of Violence in Southern Gothic's Haunted Mansions - Elisabeth Blumer Hardy: Pageant Culture, Media, Social Class and Power - Natalie Adams/James Adams: «We All Came Together on the Football Field»: Unpacking the Blissful Clarity of a Popular Southern Sports Story - Hunter Chadwick: High-Priced Sports: Parents, Sports, and the South - Nichole A. Guillory: Finding My Place In/Against a Peculiar Institution - Kamden K. Strunk, Lucy E. Bailey, and William C. Takewell: «The Enemy in the Midst»: Gay-Identified Men in Christian College Spaces - Joshua Moon Johnson: Gay and Queer Men of Color at Southern Universities - Lemuel W. Watson: The World Through My Eyes: A Rural Southern Boy Comes of Age.