Overview
Laura Sabatini is an M.A. student in Anthropology through Cornell University’s Employee Degree Program, with a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Her research interests include visual anthropology, Indigenous self-representation and visual sovereignty, relationships to water and place, language revitalization, cultural and ecological continuance, and relational approaches to anthropological research. Her current research focuses particularly on contemporary Shinnecock cultural and intellectual production and considers how anthropology and photography can engage Indigenous self-representation while remaining accountable to consent, relationship, refusal, and the limits of researcher authority.
Laura’s work also engages family history, archives, photography, and questions of reconnection to place. Her developing M.A. thesis explores how genealogy can function as context rather than credential and how photography might operate as a relational practice rather than simply as documentation or evidence. More broadly, she is interested in forms of anthropological practice that prioritize Indigenous knowledge sovereignty, community authority over representation, and non-extractive relationships. She earned her B.A. from SUNY Cortland, where she dual-majored in Anthropology and Secondary Social Studies Education, and completed a Digital Photography Certificate through eCornell.
Selected project: Footsteps on and Fallacies of the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign: Reconsidering 2029 — an ongoing photographic and digital StoryMap examining the commemoration of the Sullivan–Clinton Campaign across Haudenosaunee homelands and considering Indigenous presence, representation, and public memory.
Project link: Footsteps on and Fallacies of the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign
