Posts by Amanda R Peters

Commodity production drives roughly 27% of global deforestation1. This loss accelerates biodiversity decline, degrades soils, and undermines forests’ capacity to sequester carbon. In response, governments are increasingly turning to market-based environmental governance mechanisms to curb deforestation in global supply chains. Notable examples include New York State’s proposed Tropical Rainforest Economic & Environmental Sustainability (TREES) Act and the European Union Regulation on Deforestation-Free Products (EUDR).
The EUDR, expected to enter into force in December 2026, will require producers of deforestation-risk commodities to provide polygon-level evidence that their products are deforestation-free. While these policies are designed to advance environmental goals, they also raise urgent questions about equity and inclusion in global supply chains.
At the center of these concerns are smallholder farmers. Small-scale and family farms manage approximately 87% of the world’s agricultural land2. In many deforestation-intensive value chains—such as timber, beef, and palm oil—smallholders make up a substantial share of producers3-5. Yet these actors often lack the financial, technical, and administrative capacity to comply with stringent traceability and verification requirements. As a result, many fear exclusion from global markets as sustainability regulations take effect.
This raises a critical question: Will well-intentioned deforestation governance inadvertently reinforce existing social inequities by pushing smallholders out of global supply chains?

Meditation has been deeply impactful in my life, and I want others to experience the positive shifts that come with it. Reflecting on my nine years of practice, I realized that current tools fail to track progress objectively or adapt to a person’s real-time needs. As a regular user of the Headspace app, I’ve often wondered if I’m performing the technique correctly or if my experience is actually deepening over time. A major limitation with standard guided meditations is their reliance on fixed-interval reminders. If a user loses focus ten seconds after an awareness reminder, they might spend the next few minutes lost in thought rather than training their mind. This inspired me to create a system where awareness reminders could adapt to the user by detecting when focus is lost and gently nudging them back immediately. This approach helps sustain awareness longer, naturally decreasing the need for reminders as the user’s skill improves.
The U-M Library mini grant provided the support needed to make this happen. With the funding to purchase a Muse Athena EEG (electroencephalography) headset, I brought the idea to my graduate Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course and teamed up with Alexander Bartolozzi, Donald Lin, and Annus Zulfiqar. Together, we built Reflect - an EEG-powered app that uses machine learning to accelerate the learning rate of meditation practices. It tracks meditation states in real-time, playing a gentle audio cue to restore awareness when the mind wanders, and dynamically adapts to the user's ability to maintain focus.

My name is Qihao Liang, and I’m a rising senior in Sociology in the Honors Program. I am deeply grateful for the U-M Library Student Mini Grant, which supported my May 8 to 23, 2025 fieldwork in Taiwan for my honors thesis on investment and education migration between Mainland China and Taiwan since 2008. I also want to thank Dr. Liangyu Fu, Director of the Asia Library, whose research guidance, fieldwork planning, and safety check-ins made this work possible. Writing in mid-August, I see how being on the ground in Taiwan reshaped my project; embodiment became tangible (what Ruth Behar calls “the vulnerable observer”), bringing emotional resonance and my own researcher subjectivity into view. Stepping onto the island as a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with relatives separated across the Strait, I learned that self-exposure, the experience of being scrutinized and scrutinizing, and the slow time of fieldwork with participants—walking, eating, talking, getting lost—led me and, I hope, my readers to places that Zoom calls, archives, and scraping Instagram, Xiaohongshu, or Threads cannot reach.

Happy Birthday Stefan is an Pinteresque comedy short film following Stefan, an early 20s pre-med student. After a long day, Stefan comes home to find his family and friends have thrown a surprise party for him. The only problem is it’s not his birthday, and he’s never met any of these people in his life.
This work, while standing alone as solely a chaotically psychedelic milieu, further serves as a repurposed trenchant political allegory on the current crisis of democratic backsliding and populist rhetoric in the United States.
Happy Birthday Stefan allows viewers to contemplate the danger of U.S democracy being overturned, and who dictates whether or not this happens. In the age of the “uninformed voter,” and amidst the political regression sweeping the nation, exemplified from insurrection to reproductive rights restriction to rampant civilian onslaught, this message has never been more relevant.

Iphis and Ianthe is a short film that places the Greek myth of the same name in a more contemporary framework.

The original myth of Iphis and Ianthe tells the story of an impoverished couple in ancient Crete who is forced to give up their daughter due to their inability to afford her future dowry price. However, on the evening before the delivery of her daughter, Telethusa prays to the goddess Isis for a solution. Isis gives her word that she will have a daughter but the next day, Telethusa gives birth to a daughter. She hides her child’s gender to her husband and raises the baby as a boy, naming him Iphis. Iphis grows up unaware of his differences from his male friends. One day, he meets a young woman named Ianthe and they instantly fall in love. Iphis quickly asks for her hand in marriage but fears her discovery of his female sex. He begs Isis to make him a biological man and she grants his wish, fulfilling her promise to Telethusa 18 years prior.

Our film updates this story, questioning the idea that all transgender individuals seek surgery to alleviate their dysphoria. Instead, we discuss Iphis’s process of learning how to accept his body and becoming comfortable sharing himself with another human being.

Team PACT stands for “Preventive and Accessible Cervical Cancer Testing” and is an M-HEAL project team. We formed in the Fall of 2021.
Team PACT is partnered with Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Ghana to develop a method for
cervical cancer screening that is effective, non-invasive, and cost-efficient. Our device
accomplishes this by collecting urine to be screened for high-risk HPV strains. Our mission is
to design a cervical cancer screening urine collection device for genotypic females aged
21-65 who are unable or uncomfortable with getting tested by a medical professional.

From mid-May to mid-July this summer, I joined the U-M Library’s International Studies team as their Southeast Asian studies librarianship intern. I applied to the inaugural internship program, hoping to build upon my previous work experiences in metadata and cataloging services at three different academic libraries in California and Massachusetts. As a student copy cataloger and a part-time assistant, I mainly proofread certain parts of bibliographic records that are considered crucial (e.g. book titles, page numbers, etc.) and transferred records from a shared online database to a local one used by the U-M Library. In other words, I did what is called copy cataloging and other entry-level tasks involved in processing new library materials. In short, I arrived in Ann Arbor with the goal of expanding my understanding of librarianship, which was limited to a few library jobs I have had. 

Chicana poet and cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa says: “Making anthologies is also activism. In the process of creating the composition, the work of art, you’re creating the culture. You’re rewriting the culture, which is very much an activist kind of thing.”

Similarly, I have curated this presentation as an anthology - from the composers and artists that I have commissioned and programmed, to the interviews, images, the words of Latina scholars, and parts of my own story. As a person of color, as a Latina, a chicana. I have learned that telling our stories is a form of activism. This is why in many ways, silencing us is also an act of violence.

I am curating this collaboration of new music by Latina composers to facilitate a public platform and to open a dialogue about Latina culture, identity, and experiences in higher education, specifically in the field of western classical music. This project enriches the art form by contributing a diverse collection of new works to the repertoire, addressing societal issues and promoting Latina artists in classical music.

I am a 2022-2023 recipient of a University of Michigan Library Student Mini Grant. I am using the grant to support my mixed-methods dissertation, which aims to learn how we can improve rural student college access and connect rural high schoolers with postsecondary opportunities that align with their goals. Through a randomized controlled trial (RCT), I am testing how an informational intervention—providing rural seniors with information about a statewide free tuition program—affects their college-going behavior. I will contextualize these results with findings from focus groups with rural high school seniors about their knowledge of the program and their perspectives on the programs’ affordances and limitations.

Pressure ulcers are injuries to the skin and underlying tissue that form due to prolonged pressure. Bedridden patients are the most susceptible to these wounds, so hospital nurses need to turn them every few hours to alleviate the built-up pressure. In public hospitals like San Juan de Dios in Guatemala City, there is a high incidence of these wounds due to understaffing.

Currently, hospitals in Guatemala have egg carton foam mattresses intended to reduce the incidences of bedsores. However, even with these mattresses, patients who are not turned would still develop preliminary pressure ulcers in as little as six hours. Additionally, it is difficult for nurses in this hospital to prioritize and communicate which patients need to be turned because they use paper and pencil to track the patients. Thus, current prevention methods would benefit from engineering solutions that reduce the physical and mental demand on nurses to turn patients.