Who We Are
Land Lab is a collaborative, interdisciplinary community of faculty and students at the University of Montana united by questions of land, power, and people. We take a political ecology approach — grounding our research in specific places, histories, and communities to understand how deeply unequal landscapes of social and environmental benefit and harm come to be, and how they might be changed.
Why Land?
Land is where abstract forces — policy, capital, climate, culture — become concrete and consequential in people's lives. It is the terrain of belonging and exclusion, livelihood and loss, conservation and dispossession. For Land Lab members, land is a unifying thread across diverse research topics that include: agricultural adaptation to climate change, water governance, rural food systems, wildlife conservation, and international development. Our work spans these topics primarily in rural communities, where relationships to land are especially direct and where inequities are often particularly acute.
We believe research should not only document inequities but help dismantle them. That means building genuine partnerships with the communities whose lives and landscapes we study, centering local knowledge alongside scholarly analysis, and engaging with policy and civic processes as well as academic ones.
A Note on the Land Beneath This Work
The lands on which we live, work, and learn — including the University of Montana's campus in Missoula — are the ancestral homelands of the Seliš (Say-lish) and Ql̓ispé (Ka-lis-puh) peoples. The dispossession of this land is part of the US’ ongoing legacy of racialized land dispossession and accumulation. The dynamics of Indigenous land dispossession, forced removal, and accumulation by settler institutions are continuous with the land conflicts, rural inequities, and climate vulnerabilities that Land Lab members study today. The university itself was built on — and through — these injustices, and decolonizing higher education requires naming that honestly. We take this legacy seriously as an analytical starting point, not just an acknowledgment. Land has always been a site of struggle, and it remains one of the most powerful levers for building more just and ecologically resilient futures. That conviction animates everything we do.
Our Name
Land Lab at the University of Montana is named in honor of Dr. Nancy Peluso's Land Lab at UC Berkeley, where both of our co-directors — Dr. Margiana Petersen-Rockney and Dr. Hilary Faxon — trained.
