Environmental Humanities Project: Public Lecture: “Ripple Effects: Making with Rivers in War and Peace” with Amanda M. Smith

Description:

Book Talk with Amanda Smith

"Hydrofeminism posits that water is a life-giving body that permeates other bodies and blurs corporeal boundaries. According to this theory, water is thus a subject from which and with which to think. Building on this premise, I suggest that if we are always thinking with water (Chen, MacLeod, Neimanis), then creative processes necessarily rely on aqueous ecologies while also interacting with and making them. Based on my forthcoming book, The Nature of Conflict: Rivers in the Wake of the Colombian Peace Accords, I examine how rivers in particular have participated in media that addresses their place in Colombia's long and ongoing internal conflict. Tracing what I call "ripple effects"—aesthetic decisions, procedures and effects that register the material marks of a watershed's involvement in art-making—I consider the interdisciplinary Environmental Humanities methods required to take water seriously as a creative subject. Ultimately, I argue that creative practice involving bodies of water transforms media into an archive of fluvial subjectivity, even if in a vestigial form, offering a lens with which to approach, in this case, the more-than-human impacts of war."

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Bio:

Amanda M. Smith is Associate Professor of Latin American literature and culture at the University of California Santa Cruz and one of the co-editors of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Her research explores cultural responses to environmental crises in Latin America, with particular emphasis on Amazonian and Andean contexts. She is the author of two books: Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom (Liverpool University Press, 2021), recently translated as Trazar la Amazonía: Geografía literaria después de la fiebre del caucho (Ediciones UniAndes, 2026), and the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project, The Nature of Conflict: Rivers in the Wake of the Colombian Peace Accords (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming). Other publications have appeared in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology, and Society, and Revista: Harvard Review of Latin America, among others. From 2022 to 2026 she managed two grants to digitize the collections at the Biblioteca Amazónica in Iquitos, Peru.