Laura Dev, PhD
Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences & Society
University of Wisconsin-Platteville
Scholarly Interests
I teach about land, justice, conservation, and stewardship. I am interested in changing relationships between humans and their environments in the face of globalization and global changes—especially emergent more-than-human collaborations and economies.
As a researcher, I use a political ecology and multispecies ethnography approach to study plant-human relations and land practices at the intersection of political economy, forests, and conservation.
Community-based research
I work closely with several Indigenous organizations, and use participatory action research approaches to collaboratively develop community-led responses to local environmental concerns in the Amazon. I have two ongoing projects focused on supporting Indigenous-led conservation efforts oriented toward climate justice. We are developing a novel mechanism that links Indigenous territorial defense against extractive industries with climate financing.
Book Project
My book project, Ayahuasca and the Cosmopolitics of Healing: Interspecies Entwinements in the Peruvian Amazon, examines the relations, practices, and economies surrounding ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant mixture from the Amazon that is used for healing. Due to increasing international interest, a growing tourism associated with ayahuasca has restructured rural economies and ecologies in Ucayali, which previously depended on extractive industries and exploited Indigenous labor. I follow two threads throughout the book: How relations between plants and people have shifted, and how relations between Shipibo communities and outsiders have shifted in association with the ayahuasca boom. I found that despite ayahuasca’s transformation into a global commodity, Indigenous healers face barriers to benefiting from these burgeoning commodity networks.
Education
I hold a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley and an MS in Ecology from Colorado State University. For my masters, I studied the interactive effects of climate change and grazing on grassland plant communities.
