“I tell the students: ‘Act like you’ve moved to a foreign country. Things, at times, will seem that odd to you. But in time you will learn to think of them as normal.'”

What happens when people from different regions wind up living near one another? How does this play out in the South where, we suspect, a distinct, pre-existing sense of place might lead to an exaggerated contrast between locals and outsiders? What happens when “southerners” become a smaller and smaller proportion of the local population as more and more “northerners” move in? How does such a dynamic change and/or redefine both a place and the people in it? When native southerners interact with people who live in the South but are not from the South, often these contacts give rise to a contested terrain, in which groups vie to claim the same geographic and social space.