Meghan Morris: Soil Forensics: Property and the Buried Truth in Medellín

Meghan Morris a cultural anthropologist and legal scholar. Her research examines the role of law in conflict and peacemaking, with a particular focus on property over land. Her book manuscript, Making Peace with Property: Specters of Post-Conflict Colombia, examines how property can become understood as both the root of violent conflict and the key to peace. It explores this question through an ethnographic account of how the reordering of property is central to efforts to achieve a post-conflict era in Colombia. Her current book project, This Land is My Land: Property, Paramilitarism, and the American Dream, examines the contemporary and historical relationship between property and paramilitarism in the United States. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Alabama Law Review, Tulane Law Review, and the Revista Colombiana de Antropología (Colombian Journal of Anthropology). She hold a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a B.S. in Policy Analysis and Management from Cornell University. She is an Assistant Professor in the College of Law and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati. I was previously the ABF/NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Law and Inequality at the American Bar Foundation and a senior researcher at the Bogotá-based Center for Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia).
The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.
This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.
It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?