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Sara BellanCohort 2026
Education
- BA, Social Anthropology and Political Science, Barnard College of Columbia University
- MPhil, Social Anthropological Research, University of Cambridge
Research
- Resource extraction and mining
- Memory, history, and time
- U.S. Northwest and Pacific Coastline
- Social and labor movements
- Gender and queerness
- Colonialism and coloniality
- Land connection
- Experimental ethnography
My name is Sara Bellan (she/her). My research interests center around memory, rurality, resource extraction, and environmental degradation in North America, lying at the intersection of social and environmental anthropology.
In my doctoral research, I aim to focus on former coal and copper mining communities in the process of, or contending with, deindustrialization in the Pacific Northwest of the US — and more specifically, in the Cascade Mountain Range. My research aims to explore how these communities relate to the land, minerals, and soil; colonialism and land dispossession; past labor and social movements; and contemporary working industries in the region. I will attend to the ways in which resource extraction (and consequential mine abandonment) has informed historical identity-creation, memory-keeping praxis, commemoration, and formations of political power in the Cascades.
