My research and teaching focuses on reinterpreting landscape through interconnected relations of environment, care, and infrastructures of race and coloniality. I research how socio-ecological care arises in response to extractive processes that have instrumentalized human, plant, and animal life, and the alliances and entanglements that refuse this ordering logic. My current projects consider how power was spatialized in and through landscape professionalization in the early twentieth century, and how thinking with ideas of erosion, fracture, or rupture, through materials such as seeds, soil, or water, can unsettle landscape practices historically predicated on the harm, violence, or suppression of living systems. Trained in landscape architecture, environmental history, and geography, I have published on the politics and possibilities of care, histories of racialization within landscape practice, and environmental histories of soil, contamination, and carceral labour in journals such as Journal of Landscape Architecture, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Architectural Education, and Landscape Research. Previous to academia, I worked at SCAPE on projects addressing climate crisis at the overlaps of water, land, and ecological memory. Prior to joining SALA, I was a lecturer at the University of Washington and the Myles H. Thaler Visiting Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia..
Select publications
Sara Jacobs and Taryn Wiens. “Landscapes of care: politics, practices, and possibilities.” Landscape Research. (2023).
Sara Jacobs. “Materiality as Inquiry: Environmental Histories for New Worlds.” In Conceptual Landscapes: New Perspectives in the Earliest Stages of Design, ed. Simon Bussiere. New York: Routledge: 2023.
Sara Jacobs in conversation with Jay Cephas, Pollyanna Rhee, and Eliot Sturtevant. “Landscape History, Now.” PLATFORM, Platformspace.net (April 17, 2023).
Sara Jacobs. “Site as Power: Site Histories for Lively futures.” KERB 30: POWER: Resistance and Surrender. Agency in a Landscape of Uncertainty. (2023): 83-85.
Sara Jacobs. “Visualizing Nature, Race, and Urban Landscapes through Warren Manning’s A National Plan.” In Rethinking the Urban Landscape, Ed. Thaisa Way and Davis Karmon. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 81:3 (September 2022): 282-284.
Sara Jacobs and Taryn Wiens. “Breaking Ground: Sifting Soil Stories at Bos Park.” Journal of Architectural Education. 76:2 (2022): 163-169.
Sara Jacobs. “From novel to relational: An approach to care for relational landscapes.” Journal of Landscape Architecture, 14: 3 (2019): 86-95.
Education
PhD, University of Washington
MLA, Harvard University
BA, University of California, Berkeley