Lindsay Smith

Lindsay Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The University of New Mexico. After getting her PhD in medical anthropology at Harvard University, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics and a Fellow in Science and Human Culture at Northwestern University. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of transitional justice, trauma, and scientific meaning-making. Her book manuscript, Subversive Genes: Making human rights and DNA in Argentina, examines the impact of the invention of forensic genetics on the constitution of family, justice, and democracy in post-dictatorship Argentina. As an engaged anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, Lindsay has made films and published in collaboration with human rights groups, including the documentary Aparición con Vida, detailing the use of DNA in the search for children kidnapped during the Argentine Dirty War. She is currently conducting an ethnographic study of the Latin American Initiative to Identify the Disappeared (LIID), a multinational scientific collaboration to use large-scale DNA databanking to identify those killed and disappeared during dictatorship and armed conflict in Argentina, Guatemala, and Peru.