Name: Maria Pettis
Project: Bottomlands: Mapping Black Cemeteries in the Mid-Mississippi River Delta
Bio: Maria comes to the Bear Bones Lab by way of Chicagoland and the Deep South. With a background in Envrionmental Studies, Racial & Environmental Geography. As a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and a Graduate Affiliate of the Berkeley Center of New Media (BCNM), her dissertation centers the erasure and endurance of working class Black Life in the contemporary Mid-Mississippi River Delta region, through an analysis of discourse, ecology, and material culture. While working with the Bear Bones Lab, community organizations and descendants in Mississippi, Maria will be furthering a project and approach of locating, mapping, and surveying cryptic rural burial grounds in the region today.