Ame Min-Venditti (they/them/elle) is a scholar motivated by water stories, sharing and learning from ancestral wisdom to create just and peaceful futures. Ame is a participatory action researcher engaging in community-centered work on water’s relationships to humans and our more-than-human world. They have used methods such as participatory scenario planning, photovoice, and opinion writing pedagogy across North and South America. Ame is a PhD candidate in Sustainability at Arizona State University.
Their dissertation research focuses on water justice and memories of the mundane through times of oppression in the Korean peninsula, focusing on Jeollanamdo, the historic home of the 1980 South Korean Democratic Uprising. Thus, as part of the Korean diaspora, Ame also connects their homecoming experience to understandings of resurfacing traditional environmental knowledge as a mode of healing from intergenerational trauma. Bridging humanities and sustainability science, as well as academia and community work, Ame’s goal is to contribute to more peaceful and right relations between all living beings.
- Why did you apply to HASTAC?
I am in an interdisciplinary field yet I think we need to do a better job of learning from and with humanities scholarship! So, I thought this was a great fit for joining a community of practice where I would be amongst other folks questioning and in some cases rebuking intellectual boundaries. Furthermore, my work is at the nexus of digital archiving and traditional ecological knowledge, so I want to better understand nuances of communities’ relationships to their land, water, and territory and how digital spaces can help foster them and share stories intergenerationally.
- What has been your favorite course so far as an instructor or student? Why?
This is tough! I have been fortunate to encounter some brilliant pedagogy and class communities over my time in academia. The most recent course that stands out to me was Transborder Queer Performativity, which was my first class-based introduction to transborder studies, queer theory, and performance studies! Some of the reasons it was unusually meaningful included interactive warm-ups that required us students to consider our identities, embodied behaviors, emotions, all in the context of spontaneous performances. I still remember the week we had to make up an infomercial and I tried to sell a “bowl on a stick” (aka a spoon). I had so much fun! Each student also developed a longer performance throughout the course, which was both healing and freeing for me in a wonderful way! Marivel Danielson was an incredible, caring instructor, who brought our favorite snacks weekly, and whose example I admire greatly—as a scholar, teacher, and good ancestor.
- What do you want to do after you graduate?
I want to create sustained spaces and communities for learning, intellectual growth, and collaboration. I want to keep doing research projects, with enough confidence and credibility to not get in my own way. I want to grow a garden and stay in one place enough to not feel guilty raising a dog. I want to become a co-parent. I want to publish my dissertation findings and make more zines! I would like to start a school as an alternative to some current “knowledge enterprises” that seem to replace critical coursework with a primary aim of checking boxes to give people credentials for higher pay.
- What’s something that people would be surprised to know about you?
When I was a senior in college, my roommate gave me a tarot card deck and I have had a practice of reading tarot since then. I find it to be an effective method for reflexive analysis (such as when I’m stuck on something for research!) and has grown into a collaborative form of speculative, divinatory, symbolic meaning-making. I’m most recently working with the Asian American Literature Review’s tarot deck. Feel free to reach out if you want to share a Zoom reading!
- What are some things that you wish you had known before you got into graduate school?
I think the skills of project management, entrepreneurship, and community building are essential to grad school being fulfilling and not taking too much of a toll on my well-being. Even with those, it’s incredibly taxing, and that is something that you are not alone on—we all go through the formation rituals in one way or another. I wish I had known to follow my instincts, to not feel ashamed of my ideas, the way I think, or what questions I have that I’m curious to learn more about. I wish I had known that often mentors are just waiting for you to ask them for support—and you never know where you’ll find them. I think possibly the hardest part is getting out of your own way. Also, it’s essential to have a creative outlet and physical outlet. In my case, I cycle through hobbies but a consistent practice I hold is making a collage every month of my PhD thus far. It helps me express something I need to without words, and the flow state of collage brings me into more connection with my creative self.
- What do you hope to accomplish with your research or teaching?
I hope to share stories through my research and teaching, and inspire new ways of relating, to ourselves, others, and the world, to become more caring and loving as well as living in integrity with our ideals and values. My work is always for collective liberation. I have hope for changes that will lead to flourishing worlds where people of the global majority lead thriving lives of self-determination without terror. My work is guided by that hope.
- What are you currently reading, watching, or listening to?
I’m listening to Worlds Beyond Number, a fantastical radio drama podcast series, reading Love in a F*cked up world, a relationship and resistance movement self-help book by Dean Spade, The River Has Roots, a quest and a riddle about memory and the magical conjucation of river waters by Amal El-Mohtar, Ragás, because the sea has no place to grab by Sonia Vaz Borges which is a memoir of homecoming that I can relate to deeply and across many oceans and colonial contexts. I’m also re-watching Reservation Dogs, which is brilliant.