Picturing the Plantation as a Site of Displacement
A photo essay by Christine Horn from her fieldwork in Sarawak, Borneo, shows how oil palm plantations rearrange and displace communities and landscapes.
Category: Fieldnotes
On Being the (Only) Black Feminist Environmental Ethnographer in Gulf Coast Louisiana
Ethnographer Frances Roberts-Gregory describes the importance of embracing ‘Black girl reliable’ and supporting frontline communities.
Can Small-Scale Farming Save Oil Palm?
Drawing from her fieldwork with small-scale oil palm growers and plantation workers in Colombia, Angela Serrano describes a smaller way to farm oil palm.
There’s More Than One World. There’s a Pluriverse.
A researcher reflects on the pluriverse and how the idea of multiple worlds and ways of knowing reoriented her approach to fieldwork.
Farm Life on an Energy Frontier
How does energy production affect agricultural livelihoods and the fabric of local communities in southwestern North Dakota? As wind turbines, oil rigs, and “man camps” spread across the region, responses from residents vary from resentment to acceptance.
The Pleasures of Teaching Plastic
Plastic shapes us even as it contributes to our destruction. A performance studies scholar shares her creative approach to teaching about plastic and identity in an unavoidably plastic world.
Wading out the Kickapoo River Flood
After historic floods devastate Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, a team of scientists reflects on their fieldwork in the Kickappo River Valley to make sense of an entangled, multispecies world.
Private Land Conservation is Troubling—and Probably Indispensable
When a writer joins scientists on a mushroom hunt at a Gilded Age wilderness retreat, she grapples with the exclusions and inequalities that have produced such an ecologically valuable landscape.
Love for Home in a Place Industry Left Behind
When the mines closed throughout Wisconsin’s Gogebic Range, its population collapsed. But many left their hearts there. Now some are even moving back.
Ole Miss and the Shadow of Slavery: A Conversation with Jeffrey Jackson and Charles Ross
Ivy League institutions are scrambling to uncover their links to the history of slavery. But the University of Mississippi—built by slaves, amid slave plantations, for slaveowners to teach future slaveowners—might offer the richest insights into the nation’s unshakable ties to centuries of bondage.
