Fields of Resistance

Professor LaShandra Sullivan investigates land rights movements and inspires a new generation of thinkers.

BY ROMEL HERNANDEZ

LaShandra Sullivan has spent years doing anthropological fieldwork with Guaraní land activists in the cerrado (savannah) region of southwest Brazil. Traveling to roadside protest camps built next to sprawling plantations by protesters in Mato Grosso do Sul, she came to develop an enduring bond with people who are deeply connected to their ancestral land, despite decades of exploitation, despoliation, and displacement by powerful multinational agribusiness interests. She may have been a continent away from rural Mississippi, where she spent idyllic weekends, holidays, and summer breaks growing up, but her childhood experiences there were deeply relevant to her work. Memories of playing outdoors near cow pastures among streams and pecan trees with her siblings and cousins influenced her perspectives on the many ways land shapes a community’s identity.

“The research I do is informed by having spent a lot of time in rural Mississippi, on my family’s land,” she says. “Looking back, my experience of that environment was formative.”

Sullivan’s ethnographic work in the Brazilian interior between 2007 and 2011 is culminating in her first book, Unsettling Agribusiness: Indigenous Protests and Land Conflict in Brazil, set to be published this summer by the University of Nebraska Press.

She has had another reason to celebrate recently—she entered 2022–23, her seventh year on Reed’s faculty, as a newly tenured professor in the anthropology department. She is the first Black professor to achieve tenure in the Division of History and Social Sciences at Reed.