HISPANIC HERITAGE MONTH EVENT SERIES

Professor Kristina Lyons is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH). She also holds affiliations with the Center for Latin American and Latinex Studies and the Center for Experimental Ethnography at Penn. Her current research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, feminist science studies, and legal anthropology in Latin America.  

Her 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, geological processes, participatory forms of territorial planning, socionatural disaster, and water-inspired subjectivities.