In early April, Mellon Sawyer PhD Fellow Lauren Kelly (History) and USC faculty member Alexander Robinson (Architecture) co-organized a field research trip to the Owens Valley, featuring visits to numerous sites in the region. The group went on a bird-watching tour of Owens Lake led by local ornithologist Michael Prather, visited the Owens Valley Paiute-Shoshone Cultural Center and the Eastern California Museum, toured the Manzanar National Historic Site, and Professor Robinson gave the group a tour of the The Center for Land Use Interpretation sites in the area, including his own research station.

The field research trip was an opportunity for the Mellon Sawyer Precarious Ecologies group and their collaborators to learn more about the multilayered histories of the Paiute, water, settlers, and uses of the land in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the Owens Valley.

Learn more about the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series Precarious Ecologies here.