Kristina Lyons

Kristina Lyons

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

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 Latin American and Latinx Studies Program (LALS).  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 (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 small farmers – who attempt to cultivate alternatives to commercial coca crops and the military-led, growth-oriented development paradigms intended to substitute them. Kristina is currently a Fulbright grantee (2020-2021) in Colombia working with the Special Jurisdiction for Peace on the investigation for the first macro-criminal that renders visible “nature” and territory as victims of the armed conflict within the country’s ongoing transitional justice process.