Newswise — University of New Hampshire Professor of Sociology Cynthia "Mil" Duncan, founding director of UNH's Carsey Institute and an expert on rural poverty, especially in Appalachia, is available to the media to discuss persistent poverty and underdevelopment as background to understanding conditions related to the Sago Mine accident in West Virginia.
Widely recognized for her research on rural poverty, Duncan is author of "Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America" (Yale University Press, 1999), an award-winning book that grew out of her time working in Central Appalachia in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1975 to 1987 Duncan worked as research director at the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development in Kentucky, and from 2000 to 2004 she was director of community and resource development at the Ford Foundation.
"Chronic poverty in rural areas"¦ really represents long-term neglect and lack of investment " a lack of investment in people as well as communities. And in the rural areas that I know in America, that lack of investment began as deliberate efforts by those in power " local elites or employers " to hold people back. Because it has worked for them, to keep their labor force vulnerable, keep them powerless," said Duncan in an interview for PBS's Frontline (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/readings/duncan.html).
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