In this session, Lisa Blackmore and Alejandro Ponce de León will talk about a series of mapping processes that they’ve been engaged in with river communities in Latin America. They will explore how art and humanities research intersects with water activism and how collaborative editorial and curatorial work can support emergent and resilient practices that care for common waters. The session will involve some hands-on work to identify together these practices and the affective attachments that bind us to water.

Lisa Blackmore – Curator, researcher, educator, working between creative practice, collaborative projects and public outreach. Since 2018, she has been directing entre— ríos, a research and artistic platform that invents participatory and interdisciplinary methodologies, online and in person, that connect knowledges and communities to bodies of water. Lisa obtained her PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies from Birkbeck College in 2011 and is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex, UK. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. In 2023, she was a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow for her project Imagining the Hydrocommons: Art, Water and Infrastructure in Latin America.

Alejandro Ponce de León – Researcher, working at the intersection of environmental humanities and technoscience studies. He is the founder and co-editor of the Latin American Platform for Environmental Humanities, a collective that fosters dialogues on environmental thought across the Americas. His work has been published in Cultural Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Humanidades: revista de la Universidad de Montevideo, Revista Tabula Rasa, Revista Endémico, Diffractions, Tapuya, Sociological Forum, among others. Alejandro is currently a visiting scholar at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study.

This event is presented by the THI 2024-25 research cluster, UC Santa Cruz More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory.