Cynthia Kreichati is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University; Trained as a pharmacist in Lebanon, Cynthia also holds a Masters in Sociology from the American University in Beirut and has worked in various health related fields. Her work explores the relationships between politics, archives and the environment. She is now completing her doctoral dissertation project — an ethnography of the Litani river and its people — which investigates how the Litani, once central to national discourses of technological progress and abundance, has become a metonymy for state failure, societal ruin, and ecological devastation.