The Great Society takes its title from a 1960s social policy aimed at combating poverty and racial injustice, championed by the same U.S. president who stated: “if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.” Statements like these perpetuate the conflicts between race and class that persist to this day, with comments such as “baskets of deplorables,” only deepening barriers to solidarity. For Backström, West Virginia functions much like a repressed unconscious, a zone of extraction onto which projections of “backwardness” and “trash” abound.

A central touchstone for the work is the Buffalo Creek mining disaster of 1972, when a coal slurry dam collapsed and killed hundreds, left thousands homeless, and the land toxic. The mining company blamed “God’s hand,” while the community became the subject of psychiatric studies on collective trauma. Up the mountain from Buffalo Creek is Blair Mountain, where in 1921, miners marched in the largest labor uprising in American history. Beyond their heavily surveilled exteriors, the mines’ cavernous spaces of fossilized darkness conjure possibilities for resisting, concealing, and creative healing.