Placemaking and the Politics of Land

From California's wine country to the Panama Canal to Owen's Lake and the LA River, this provocative panel will explore placemaking and the land that we share, looking at issues related to labor, race, gender, sustainability, and more.

Joan Flores-Villalobos is an assistant professor of History at USC whose work focuses on histories of gender, race, and diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her first book, The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal, focuses on the West Indian women who travelled to Panama and made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. 

Julia Ornelas-Higdon is an associate professor of History at California State University, Channel Islands, whose research and teaching focus on the intersections of race, agriculture, and labor histories. Her book, The Grapes of Conquest: Race, Labor, and the Industrialization of California Wine, 1769-1920, explores California's 19th century wine industry as a site of conquest and racialization. 

Alex Robinson is a landscape architect, researcher, and associate professor in USC's Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program whose work seeks to reinvent our most consequential anthropogenic landscapes through collective authorship, multidisciplinary tools, and community engagement. His book, The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake that Made Los Angeles, examines the unlikely reinvention of Owens Lake by the city that dried it.

Moderator: William Deverell is director of the Huntington-USC Institute of California and the West and Divisional Dean of Social Sciences at USC. He is the author of numerous studies of the 19th and 20th century American West, including To Bind Up the Nation's Wounds: The American West After the Civil War and Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past.