Interspecies Relations
Plants & Pathways: More-than-Human Worlds of Power, Knowledge, and Healing
My dissertation research and current book project focus on the ayahuasca economy and the emergent relations among plants and humans, Indigenous healers and outsiders. I attend to how practices shift as plants and healing rituals are commodified for consumers from the Global North and traverse across divergent worlds.
Indigenous-Led Conservation & Climate Justice Participatory Action Research
Farmacia Viva Shipibo Sanken Yaka
This is an Indigenous-run community forestry project that aims to conserve medicinal plants and traditional knowledge systems in a rural Shipibo community in the Peruvian Amazon. I use community-based participatory research methods to advise and facilitate this project.
Kawsay Ñampi: Indigenous Conservation and Preservation of the Living Forest
For my postdoctoral research with Dr. Tracey Osborne, we are developing just mechanisms for Indigenous forest defenders to attain support for their work in protecting Amazonian forests from illegal logging, mining, and oil extraction, thereby helping to mitigate carbon emissions and provide essential ecosystem benefits for Earth’s climate.
Supporting Indigenous Women Artisans
Piri Piri Threadworks – Collaboration with the Shipibo Meken Collective
I work with a group of Shipibo women artisans, the Shipibo Meken Collective, to create a market for their embroidery-work among global consumers. We also work to provide capacity building through workshops for artisans in rural communities. Visit our Piri Piri Threadworks store on Etsy.
Illicit Geographies
Ambiguous Spaces, Empirical Traces
I and my collaborators, Lauren Withey, Karly Marie Miller, Juliet Lu, and Tracy Hruska, developed an approach to account for absences and ignorance in research around illicit activities
Criminalized Crops
Juliet Lu, Margiana Petersen-Rockney, and I are writing about how the construction of certain crops as “illicit” contributes to the further marginalization of smallholders.
Plant Ecologies
Measuring Caapi Demography to Determine Sustainable Harvest Protocols
Michael Coe, a team of Shipibo technicians, and I are conducting a demography study of wild caapi vines to determine sustainable harvest levels and the most critical life stage for population stability.
Combined Effects of Climate Change and Grazing on Grassland Vegetation
For my masters research I investigated how shifts in the seasonality of precipitation influence ecosystem sensitivity to grazing. I conducted a global meta-analysis and field research on a climate change and grazing experiment on the Tibetan Plateau.
Laura Dev 