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

Literature Cited

• Akers, J., and E. Seymour. 2018. Instrumental exploitation: Predatory property relations at city’s end. Geoforum 91:127–40. doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.02.022.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Andreucci, D., M. García-Lamarca, J. Wedekind, and E. Swyngedouw. 2017. “Value grabbing”: A political ecology of rent. Capitalism Nature Socialism 28 (3):28–47. doi: 10.1080/10455752.2016.1278027.
   Google Scholar
• Appalachian Land Ownership Taskforce (ALOT). 1983. Who owns Appalachia? Landownership and its impact. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_appalachian_studies/8/.
   Google Scholar
• Appalachian Land Study Collective. 2017. Regional land study training retreat held in Pipestem, WV. Accessed December 8, 2022. https://appalachianlandstudy.org/updates/regional-land-study-training-retreat-held-pipestem-wv.
   Google Scholar
• Appalachian Land Study Collective. Forthcoming. The role of land in a just transition. In From sacrifice zone to regeneration of land and people: Appalachian perspectives on climate and environmental justice, ed. S. Scott and K. Engle. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
   Google Scholar
• Ashwood, L. 2018. For-profit democracy: Why the government is losing the trust of rural America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
   Google Scholar
• Bailey, C., A. Gopaul, R. Thomson, and A. Gunnoe. 2021. Taking Goldschmidt to the woods: Timberland ownership and quality of life in Alabama. Rural Sociology 86 (1):50–80. doi: 10.1111/ruso.12344.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Banks, A. 1995. Class formation in the southeastern Kentucky coalfields, 1890–1920. In Appalachia in the making: The Mountain South in the nineteenth century, ed. M. Pudup, D. Billings, and A. Waller, 321–41. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
   Google Scholar
• Bhandar, B. 2016. Possession, occupation and registration: Recombinant ownership in the settler colony. Settler Colonial Studies 6 (2):119–32.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Bhandar, B. 2018. Colonial lives of property: Law, land, and racial regimes of ownership. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
   Google Scholar
• Billings, D., and K. Blee. 2000. The road to poverty: The making of wealth and hardship in Appalachia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
   Google Scholar
• Blomley, N. 2016. The territory of property. Progress in Human Geography 40 (5):593–609.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Christophers, B. 2018. The new enclosure: The appropriation of public land in neoliberal Britain. London: Verso.
   Google Scholar
• Counts, C. 2020. Fighting for equitable land access in southwest Virginia. Appalachian Voices Front Porch, December 11. Accessed May 23, 2022. https://appvoices.org/2020/12/11/fighting-for-equitable-land.
   Google Scholar
• Curley, A. 2021. Unsettling Indian water settlements: The Little Colorado River, the San Juan River, and colonial enclosures. Antipode 53 (3):705–23. doi: 10.1111/anti.12535.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• De Lara, J. 2018. Inland shift: Race, space, and capital in Southern California. Los Angeles: University of California Press. doi: 10.1525/j.ctt2204pkm.
   Google Scholar
• Desmond, M. 2016. Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city. New York: Crown.
   Google Scholar
• Du Bois, W. E. B. 1992. Black reconstruction in America. 3rd ed. New York: Atheneum.
   Google Scholar
• Dunaway, W. 1995. Speculators and settler capitalists: Unthinking the mythology about Appalachian landholding, 1790–1860. In Appalachia in the making: The Mountain South in the nineteenth century, ed. M. Pudup, D. Billings, and A. Wallers, 50–75. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
   Google Scholar
• Dunbar-Ortiz, R. 2014. An indigenous peoples’ history of the United States: ReVisioning American history. Boston: Beacon Press.
   Google Scholar
• Edelman, M. 2021. Hollowed out Heartland, USA: How capital sacrificed communities and paved the way for authoritarian populism. Journal of Rural Studies 82:505–17. doi: 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.10.045.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Epstein, K., J. Haggerty, and H. Gosnell. 2022. With, not for, money: Ranch management trajectories of the super-rich in Greater Yellowstone. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 112 (2):432–48.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Estes, N. 2019. Our history is the future: Standing rock versus the Dakota Access pipeline, and the long tradition of indigenous resistance. London: Verso.
   Google Scholar
• Fairbairn, M. 2020. Fields of gold: Financing the global land rush. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. doi: 10.1515/9781501750106.
   Google Scholar
• Fals-Borda, O. 1987. The application of participatory action-research in Latin America. International Sociology 2 (4):329–47. doi: 10.1177/026858098700200401.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund (FSC/LAF) and Alcorn State University. 2018. Land loss trends among socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers in the Black Belt region. Accessed May 23, 2022. https://d787394ea354-4150-bcbe-fc86ac15e999.filesusr.com/ugd/dc293f_224ddd9bd8d94bdd9f84f4e8cb189bfd.pdf.
   Google Scholar
• Florida, R., and A. Ozimek. 2021. How remote work is reshaping America’s urban geography. Wall Street Journal, March 5. Accessed May 16, 2022. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-remote-work-is-reshaping-americas-urban-geography-11614960100.
   Google Scholar
• Fraser, R., B. Gyawali, and J. Schelhas. 2005. Blacks in space: Land tenure and well-being in Perry County, Alabama. Small-Scale Forest Economics, Management and Policy 4 (1):21–33. doi: 10.1007/s11842-005-0002-0.
   Google Scholar
• Gaither, C. 2016. Have not our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers sighed? Heirs’ property in the southern United States. e-Gen. Tech. Rep. SRS-216, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Asheville, NC. Accessed May 23, 2022. https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_srs216.pdf.
   Google Scholar
• Gaventa, J. 1982. Power and powerlessness: Quiescence and rebellion in an Appalachian valley. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
   Google Scholar
• Geisler, C., and F. Popper. 1984. Land reform, American style. London: Rowman and Allanheld.
   Google Scholar
• Gilmore, R. 2007. Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.
   Google Scholar
• Goldschmidt, W. 1978. Large-scale farming and the rural social structure. Rural Sociology 43 (3):362–66.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• GRAIN. 2008. Seized: The 2008 landgrab for food and financial security. GRAIN Briefing Report, GRAIN, Barcelona, Spain. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://grain.org/article/entries/93-seized-the-2008-landgrab-for-food-and-financial-security.
   Google Scholar
• Gunnoe, A. 2014. The political economy of institutional landownership: Neorentier society and the financialization of land. Rural Sociology 79 (4):478–504. doi: 10.1111/ruso.12045.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Horn, S. 2021. Kentucky PVAs are making a profit off of public property records. Kentucky Herald-Leader, June 4. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article251878333.html.
   Google Scholar
• Horst, M., and A. Marion. 2019. Racial, ethnic and gender inequities in farmland ownership and farming in the U.S. Agriculture and Human Values 36 (1):1–16. doi: http://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-018-9883-3.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Jacobs, H. 2020. Whose citizenship? Social conflict over property in the United States. Social Policy and Society 19 (2):343–55.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Justice, B. 2019. Land study group: Who owns the land, resources in Mingo? Mingo Messenger, August 9-11:3A.
   Google Scholar
• Kay, K. 2017. Rural rentierism and the financial enclosure of Maine’s open lands tradition. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107 (6):1407–23. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2017.1328305.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Lapena, M. 2016. Standing Rock, the Bundys, Leonard Peltier and the search for justice. Indian Country Today, November 17. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/standing-rock-the-bundys-leonard-peltier-and-the-search-for-justice.
   Google Scholar
• Khadka, S., B. Gyawali, T. Shrestha, R. Cristan, G. Antonious, and H. Poudel. 2021. Exploring relationships among landownership, landscape diversity, and ecological productivity in Kentucky. Land Use Policy 111:105723. doi: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105723.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Lomawaima, K., K. McDonough, J. M. O’Brien, and R. Warrior. 2021. Editors’ introduction: Reflections on the land-grab universities project. Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAIS) 8 (1):89–97.
   Google Scholar
• Macaulay, L., and V. Butsic. 2017. Ownership characteristics and crop selection in California cropland. California Agriculture 71 (4):221–30. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/25s7k7s7.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Malm, A. 2020. Corona, climate, chronic emergency: War communism in the twenty-first century. London: Verso.
   Google Scholar
• Massey, D. 1994. Space, place, and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
   Google Scholar
• Massey, D. 1980. The pattern of land ownership and its implications for policy. Built Environment 6 (4):263–71.
   Google Scholar
• Meadows, J. 2018. Who owns North Carolina: Econometric, geospatial, and interview analyses of land in Appalachian North Carolina for land policy reform in the Appalachians: A research design and findings to date. West Virginia Law Review 120:1089–1106. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr/vol120/iss3/17.
   Google Scholar
• Mollett, S., and C. Faria. 2013. Messing with gender in feminist political ecology. Geoforum 45:116–25. doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.10.009.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• The Nature Conservancy. 2020. A roadmap for solar on mine lands in West Virginia. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://www.nature.org/content/dam/tnc/nature/en/documents/WV-roadmap-solar-on-minelands.pdf.
   Google Scholar
• O’Keefe, E. 2021. Farmer Bill. The Land Report, August 31. Accessed April 12, 2023. https://landreport.com/2021/01/farmer-bill/.
   Google Scholar
• Otts, C. 2019. Zillow sues Kentucky over access to real estate records. WRDB News, July 15. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://www.wdrb.com/in-depth/zillow-sues-kentucky-over-access-to-real-estate-records/article_4dce2814-a733-11e9-aca8-b3a1277a870b.html.
   Google Scholar
• Palmer, M. 2020. Rendering settler sovereign landscapes: Race and property in the Empire State. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38 (5):793–810. doi: 10.1177/0263775820922233.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Penniman, L. 2018. Farming while Black: Soul fire farm’s practical guide to liberation on the land. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green.
   Google Scholar
• Pickles, J., ed. 1995. Ground truth: The social implications of geographic information systems. New York: Guilford.
   Google Scholar
• Polanyi, K. 1944. The great transformation. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.
   Google Scholar
• Ponce, L. 2022. Participatory action research in Rio De Janeiro’s sustainable favela network: From self-sufficiency and international collaboration to participatory regenerative infrastructures. In The city is an ecosystem: Sustainable education, policy, and practice, ed. D. Mutnick, M. Cuonzo, C. Griffiths, T. Leslie, and J. Shuttleworth, 177–89. London and New York: Routledge.
   Google Scholar
• Randle, A., R. Barlow, and A. Gunnoe. 2015. Southern forests in flux: Mapping changing timberland ownership in five Alabama counties. Southeastern Geographer 55 (4):459–73.
   Google Scholar
• Rasmussen, B. 1994. Absentee landowning and exploitation in West Virginia, 1760–1920. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_united_states_history/20/.
   Google Scholar
• Reese, A. 2019. Black food geographies: Race, self-reliance, and food access in Washington, D.C. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
   Google Scholar
• Rose, C. 1985. Possession as the origin of property. The University of Chicago Law Review 52 (1):73–88.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Salstrom, P. 1994. Appalachia’s path to dependency: Rethinking a region’s economic history, 1730–1940. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
   Google Scholar
• Scott, S. 2008. The Appalachian Land Ownership Study revisited. Appalachian Journal 35 (3):236–52.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Scott, S. 2009. Discovering what the people knew: The 1979 Appalachian Land Ownership Study. Action Research 7 (2):185–205. doi: 10.1177/1476750309103257.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Shade, L. 2017. Politics below the surface: A political ecology of mineral rights and land tenure struggles in Appalachia and the Andes. Doctoral diss., University of Kentucky, Lexington. doi: 10.13023/ETD.2017.195.
   Google Scholar
• Shade, L. 2015. Sustainable development or sacrifice zone? Politics below the surface in post-neoliberal Ecuador. The Extractive Industries and Society 2 (4):775–84. doi: 10.1016/j.exis.2015.07.004.
   Google Scholar
• Shelton, T. 2018. Mapping dispossession: Eviction, foreclosure and the multiple geographies of housing instability in Lexington, Kentucky. Geoforum 97:281–91.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Sommerville, M. 2018. Naturalising finance, financialising natives: Indigeneity, race, and “responsible” agricultural investment in Canada. Antipode 53 (3):643–64. doi: 10.1111/anti.12395.
   Google Scholar
• Spence, B., C. Kunkel, E. Schewel, T. Boettner, and L. Martin. 2013. Who owns West Virginia in the twenty-first century? West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy and American Friends Service Committee, Charleston, WV. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://wvpolicy.org/who-owns-west-virginia-in-the-21st-century-2/.
   Google Scholar
• Stoecker, R. 2008. Challenging institutional barriers to community-based research. Action Research 6 (1):49–67.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Stoll, S. 2017. Ramp hollow: The ordeal of Appalachia. New York: Hill and Wang.
   Google Scholar
• Sultana, F. 2021. Climate change, COVID-19, and the co-production of injustices: A feminist reading of overlapping crises. Social and Cultural Geography 22 (4):447–60. doi: 10.1080/14649365.2021.1910994.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Sundberg, J. 2004. Identities-in-the-making: Conservation, gender, and race in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 11 (1):44–66. doi: 10.1080/0966369042000188549.
   Google Scholar
• Tarus, L., M. Hufford, and B. Taylor. 2017. A green new deal for Appalachia: Economic transition, coal reclamation costs, bottom-up policymaking (part 2). Journal of Appalachian Studies 23 (2):151–69. doi: 10.5406/jappastud.23.2.0151.
   Google Scholar
• Taylor, B., D. Taylor, B. Price, and A. Munn. 2014. Economic transition in Central Appalachia: Knowledge/power mapping for bottom-up policy. Practicing Anthropology 36 (4):13–18.
   Google Scholar
• Thomas, K., and E. Kelly. 2022. Reckoning with land ownership as Central Appalachia moves away from coal: Absentee land owners, inaccurate records can stifle economic development. Appalachian Voices Front Porch, September 6. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://appvoices.org/2022/09/06/reckoning-with-land-ownership-as-central-appalachia-moves-away-from-coal/.
   Google Scholar
• United Frontline Table. 2020. A people’s orientation to a regenerative economy: Protect, repair, invest, and transform. Accessed November 13, 2022. https://climatejusticealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ProtectRepairInvestTransformdoc24s.pdf.
   Google Scholar
• Van Sant, L., and K. Bosworth. 2017. Intervention - Race, rurality, and radical geography in the US. Antipode Online, September 14. Accessed April 12, 2023. https://antipodeonline.org/2017/09/14/race-rurality-and-radical-geography/.
   Google Scholar
• Villarreal, D. 2021. Bill Gates, sustainable agriculture champion, is America’s biggest farmland owner. Newsweek, January 16. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://www.newsweek.com/bill-gates-sustainable-agriculture-champion-americas-biggest-farmland-owner-1562072.
   Google Scholar
• Williams, J. M., and E. Holt-Giménez, eds. 2017. Land justice: Re-imagining land, food, and the commons. San Francisco: Food First Books.
   Google Scholar
• Woods, C. A. 2017. Development arrested: The blues and plantation power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso.
   Google Scholar
• Workman, K. 2019. Boone Co. residents should work together to secure their future. Coal Valley News, September 11. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://www.coalvalleynews.com/news/boone-co-residents-should-work-together-to-secure-their-future/article_69fad644-14c6-56f0-9656-73ba970db5da.html.
   Google Scholar
• Wright, W., T. McCreary, B. Williams, and A. Bledsoe. 2020. Race, land, and the law: Black farmers and the limits of a politics of recognition. In Black food matters: Racial justice in the wake of food justice, ed. A. Reese and H. Garth, 228–50. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
   Google Scholar
• Young, T. 2017. The land matrix, Part 1: Stakeholders. Appalachian Voices Front Porch, October 4. Accessed December 9, 2022. https://appvoices.org/2017/10/04/the-land-matrix-part-1-stakeholders/.
   Google Scholar