Our Approach

Monuments Across Appalachian Places works to reclaim, reimagine, document, and amplify histories that highlight collective struggles for the vitality of people and our shared environment, especially by, for, and with people whose stories have been silenced, denied, or excluded.

Our mission is to inspire people to see themselves as capable of reshaping our physical landscapes to uplift histories that have potential to reshape public memory while centering communities. We aim to form new coalitions and networks that promote community well-being, collaboration, and creativity.

To amplify suppressed regional histories and strengthen community power, MAAP works with projects based in Appalachian Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. MAAP seeks monument projects that involve their communities in exploring and understanding a more nuanced and accurate chronicling of Appalachian histories.

MAAP is the current expansion of Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia (MAAV). Both MAAP and MAAV are funded by the Mellon Monuments Project and housed at Virginia Tech. MAAV facilitated nine new monuments through projects led by the community and Virginia Tech faculty, with a focus on: the diversity of Appalachian communities (with regard to race, ethnicity, indigeneity, national origin, sexuality, and more); movement across the landscape via migration and population displacement; resource extraction and environmental change; and collective struggles for social justice including anti-racist, environmental justice, feminist, and labor movements. You can find more information on these projects by visiting the Monuments page.

As you explore our website, we hope you question and reimagine what a monument can be.

Our Position

Monuments Across Appalachian Places is committed to developing collaborative, trusting, and restorative relationships with community members and organizations. We believe building these relationships means acknowledging that the presence and expansion of Virginia Tech has forever changed land use and local economies. Virginia Tech has financial and intellectual ties to extractive industries and prison labor. The Blacksburg campus occupies traditional land of the Yesą́h (Tutelo/Monacan) people and occupies land once worked by more than 200 enslaved people. One plantation house, Solitude, is part of the university’s main campus, and another plantation house repurposed as a museum, Smithfield, has a partnership with the university. Virginia Tech owns additional sites of enslavement, including Reynolds Homestead.

MAAP is based at Virginia Tech and led by Virginia Tech faculty. Because this project will produce research, documentation, installations, and performances in collaboration with dispossessed peoples and communities, MAAP acknowledges the role research universities have played in systematic and institutional abuses such as experimentation, segregation, exclusion, scientific racism, objectification, cultural tourism, stolen art, and unrepatriated artifacts. MAAP is committed to disrupting harmful power dynamics that perpetuate deep-rooted injustices between institutions of higher education and impacted communities.