Dr. Amy Leia McLachlan

Amy Leia McLachlan is a medical and environmental anthropologist whose work considers the ethics, politics, and transformative potential of relations to and through plant life. Her research since 2006 with Uitoto communities of the Colombian Amazon traces the history of extractive botanical economies as vectors of radically conflicting dreams about livable worlds. Her current book project, The World for Now: Curing and Cosmopoesis in a Migrant Amazon, draws on apprenticeship with Uitoto migrant curers, rainforest cultivators, and urban conjurers to consider the ethics of perpetual repair under conditions of permanent provisionality. A second book project, Migrant Medicine: Between the Seven Worlds with Uitoto Plant-workers, traces a path between Uitoto narratives of displacement as illness, and curing songs that locate the origins of healing in spirit migration between worlds, through participatory archive-making. An ongoing project on the 'ethics of surrogation', explores the limits of sympathy and substitution across spaces of ecological, therapeutic, and political repair.