Kristina Lyons

Dr. Kristina Lyons is associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania with affiliations with the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, Center for Experimental Ethnography, and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.  Her research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, feminist and decolonial science studies, and legal anthropology in Latin America.  Her award-winning manuscript, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (Duke 2020), moves across laboratories, greenhouses, forests, and farms in the capital city of Bogotá, Colombia and the Andean-Amazonian department of Putumayo. It weaves together an intimate ethnography of two kinds of practitioners – state soil scientists and peasant farmers – who attempt to cultivate alternatives to commercial coca crops and the military-led, growth-oriented development paradigms intended to substitute them. Her current work focuses on the memory and mourning of water, hydrogeological processes, participatory forms of territorial planning, socio-natural disaster, and water-inspired subjectivities.  She has also worked on the creation of soundscapes, street performances, photographic essays, graphic novels, community radio programs, digital storytelling platforms, and various forms of literary, journalistic writing, and public engaged scholarship. Kristina has engaged in participatory action research in the Colombian Amazon for over twenty years.