Anthropology

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Lyons Colloquium

Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
Anthropology
Virtual
wifi event
Date
Nov 18, 2021   3:00 pm  
Views
71

How does attention to and stewardship of soils point to alternative frameworks for living and dying? Dr. Lyons explores the way life strives to flourish in the face of violence, criminalization, and poisoning produced by militarized, growth-oriented development in the midst of the U.S.-Colombia war on drugs. 

Kristina Lyons is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) at the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds affiliations with the Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE) and the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies.  Kristina’s current research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, transitional justice, community-based forms of reconciliation, militarized ecologies, and science and legal studies in Colombia.  Her manuscript, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics, was published by Duke University Press in 2020 and the Spanish translation in 2021 with the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá. She is the recipient of the 2017 Cultural Horizons Prize by the Society of Cultural Anthropology and the 2016 Junior Scholar Award by the Anthropology and Environment Section of the American Anthropological Association.  Kristina was recently awarded a Fulbright Award (2020-2021) to support the work of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) in a macro-criminal case with local communities in southern Colombia that renders visible the territory as a victim of the country’s armed conflict within the country's ongoing transitional justice process. 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 and journalistic writing.

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