Honors Program
Honors in Philosophy
Date of Award
5-2022
Thesis Professor(s)
Michael Allen
Thesis Professor Department
<--College of Arts and Sciences-->
Thesis Reader(s)
Paul Tudico, Melissa Schrift
Abstract
Uneducated working-class individuals in the United States are dying from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic-related liver disease at unprecedented rates; a phenomenon economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton describe as deaths of despair. This paper focuses on deaths of despair in the Appalachian region, where mortality rates from these types of deaths are disproportionately higher than the rest of the country. Marxism and intersectionality are two philosophical frameworks that I will apply to Appalachian despair to test the adequacy of their explanatory power. By placing Marxism and intersectionality in the context of the data surrounding deaths of despair, I can test their capability to accurately diagnose and understand this health issue.
Publisher
East Tennessee State University
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Boughner, Mackenzie, "Understanding Appalachian Deaths of Despair Through a Perspective of Marxism and Intersectionality" (2022). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 708. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/708
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.