Geographies of Land Ownership Change in the Rural United States: Challenges, Methods, and Possibilities

Abstract

Both academic and popular sources have recently pointed to important changes in rural land ownership across the United States: from consolidation and financialization to racialized dispossession. Although land and land ownership are foundational themes in geography, and a wide range of disciplinary attention focuses on land ownership, much of the basic empirical information about U.S. land ownership remains obscured—due in large part to difficulty accessing and analyzing property data. This article draws on our experiences with a participatory action research project called the Appalachian Land Study to outline some of the challenges of studying the geographies of land ownership in the United States as well as some possibilities for new directions. We briefly situate this kind of research in the context of the overlapping political, economic, and ecological crises of the present, and argue that geographical studies of land ownership in the rural United States have many important applications across the discipline and beyond.