Kristina Lyons

Kristina Lyons is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania  Her current research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, transitional justice, community-based forms of reconciliation, and science studies in Colombia.  Her forthcoming manuscript, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (Duke 2020), moves across laboratories, greenhouses, forests, and farms in the capital city of Bogotá and the Andean-Amazonian department of Putumayo. It weaves together an intimate ethnography of two kinds of practitioners – state soil scientists and campesinos – who attempt to cultivate alternatives to commercial coca crops and the military-led, growth-oriented development paradigms intended to substitute them. In 2015, Dr. Lyons directed a popular education documentary film project based on farmer-to-farmer alternative agricultural practices called Cultivating a Bien Vivir (Living Well) in the Amazon. She is currently collaborating with an environmental NGO, Fundación ItarKa, in Puerto Guzmán, Putumayo on a project called “Rivers and Reconciliation,” which consists in the reconstruction of the socio-ecological memory of the Mandur River watershed in the Colombian Amazon and the community-based governance, recovery and conservation of the Mandur.

Interests: Feminist, postcolonial and decolonial interfaces with science studies, environmental humanities, politics of ‘nature’ and ‘matter’, ethnographic theory, experimental ethnography and poetics, politics and the political in Latin America, socio-ecological justice, Colombia and Latin America.