Kacie G. Hopkins (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate and Researcher with expertise in community economies, social enterprises, and geographies of rural women’s handmade crafts and creativity.
Kacie’s career highlights are below
Kacie studies in the Communication and Cultural Studies joint program at York and Toronto Metropolitan Universities. She facilitates community presentations with local community groups.
Ph.D. Student
2021 – Current
Co-Founder Wildflower Enterprises
2018 – Current
My Story
As a Ph.D. Candidate at ABD status, I research women’s community and diverse economies and the oral histories and connections that tell the stories of handmade designs.
My great-grandmother’s handmade dress inspires my research. This design as well as other handmade work from my grandmothers allow me to find grounding in my research. I am passionate about tracing the history of handmade designs made by rural women to the designs women make today. I understand this as a community economy that rural women have been leading for generations around the world. I discuss how rural women’s craft work and gathering are connected to wider socio-cultural, economic, political, and historical landscapes. I use stories to teach me and those I write for and talk with.
I use feminist reflexivity in my work as I am connected deeply to this research, and I am actively confronting and unlearning colonial ways of thinking, living, and researching.
I have presented at academic conferences such as the Rural Women’s Studies Association, Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation, the bell hooks symposium, and more.
My experience from 2012 to the present working with women artists and women’s advocacy organizations in rural Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Chicago has shaped my doctoral studies. I have lived most of my life in rural communities and have gained a deep understanding and importance of the connection and collaboration that is necessary to build social justice and positive social change movements in rural life.
Outside of Ph.D. studies, I’m active in the social enterprise Wildflower Enterprises that my twin sister and I founded to connect rural women through crafting, design, and empowerment services.
Lead Prevention Educator
2015 – 2019
In 2015 my journey in rural Pennsylvania started. I created and facilitated prevention programs throughout rural Pennsylvania while working in the rape and domestic violence crisis center. I have professional training through the YWCA, National Sexual Violence Resource Centre and the PA Coalitions Against Rape and Domestic Violence. I served as a shelter advocate and crisis hotline advocate as well as the prevention educator for Lycoming County, PA. I worked with thousands of people to implement various county-wide prevention education and advocacy initiatives. I revamped the county’s only abuse prevention programming in 2016 to apply to the current economic and political concerns that the county was facing. I worked closely with state coalitions to help the county’s local universities, public schools, afterschool programming, women’s religious groups, and criminal justice youth programming implement primary prevention programming that centered social justice, anti-racism and anti-oppression pedagogies. In 2019, I used this awareness and my MA research about isolation and women’s advocacy and obtained a $10,000 grant from the United Methodist EarthKeepers Program.