About

The Landscape Laboratory, housed in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, is a research collective that explores the diversity and complexity of landscapes, in the contemporary and across histories and futures. We are interested in landscapes as places of encounter and mutual transformations between people, plants, soils, animals, geologies, bacteria, and other biotic and abiotic, natural and supernatural beings. Questions of capital, power, justice, and the state enter our concerns even as we work through details of particular landscape forms and histories.  We focus on such topics as plant disease, climate change, coral reef health, and mining, each as a knot of sometimes unexpected entanglements in more than human worlds.

Landscapes, as we explore them, are more than inert landforms and certainly more than political representations: they can be the product of collective projects of building livable worlds. Many of us are interested in environmental and natural history, some of us work with scientists, others are interested in literature and poetry. All of us are invested in the re-imagination of anthropology and ethnography in the face of coming and ongoing environmental change. In the pages below you get a sense for what we do when we are in the field, talking to people, or learning to noticing surprises in the world. This practice of noticing is how we learn to tell stories about social and environmental change.