Sasha TyckoCohort 2019

My PhD research focuses on the Atlanta forest that became the site of intense conflict over the city’s proposal to construct a police training complex known as “Cop City” in 2021. During two years of living and working in the activist forest occupation, I used a range of media to explore how the abandoned landscape—the former site of the city prison farm and a slave plantation—motivates new articulations of history, nature, and ethics. I place the contemporary conflict in the context of a long American struggle over ideas and practices of nature, land, and freedom.

 

Throughout my research, I focus on the mystery of the past. What does it mean that the present is shaped by the past? How is history revealed and transformed in the process of political conflict? I am particularly concerned with how we come to know and understand the past—whether in the form of personal, familial, or national history—through everyday interactions with the environment.

 

I maintain a practice-based anthropology that pursues ethnographic filmmaking and photography as ways of knowing, with critical attention to the historical development of scholarly conventions in anthropology. In the course of my PhD research, I have made two films, Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest (2023, 40 min.) and Atlanta Forest Garden: Four Days of Work (co-produced with Marion Lary, 2023, 12 min.), and a photography exhibition, Ways of the Atlanta Forest.