Kristina Lyons situates her research at the interfaces of the environmental humanities, feminist and decolonial science studies, socio-ecological justice and experimental ethnography. Her book, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics 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 (Duke University Press, 2020). Lyons is the recipient of the 2017 Cultural Horizons Prize by the Society of Cultural Anthropology. Her current work focuses on the memory and mourning of water, geological processes, participatory forms of territorial planning, socio-natural disaster, and water-inspired subjecitivities. In the STS Methods Lab she will address and discuss decolonial methods in her research
STS Methods Lab: Rivers and Reconciliation: Elaborating the socioecological memory of war through science and arts-based practices
Kristina Lyons visits the STS methods lab seminar 19th October
During this workshop I will present an ethnographic and participatory action research project to reconstruct the “socioecological memory” of the Mandur River watershed in the Colombian Amazon. The objective of this project was to create conditions for community dialogues over the territorial ordering, recovery, and conservation of the watershed in the midst of ongoing socio-environmental conflicts. I will discuss the proposal to engage in what grassroots organizations call “profound reconciliation” along with the ethical stakes of reconciliatory processes that tend to human and more-than-human relations damaged by the interconnected dynamics of structural violence and decades of war. I will also share the environmental humanities-based methodologies that emerged in our collective process to elaborate the memory of the Mandur, as well as facilitate a cosmopolitical exercise to highlight the importance of fostering spaces for bettering (rather than transcending) conflict. We will also converse about the challenges posed for public engaged scholarship during times of transition that may shift toward the perpetuation of structural violence and militarized forms of conservation.
Published Oct. 11, 2023 2:35 PM
- Last modified Oct. 12, 2023 8:48 AM