Kristina Lyons

My ethnographic practice has been deeply influenced by earlier training in creative writing, especially poetry.  I consider the work of theory in literary style, and more specifically, how to make theory through poetic ethnography.  Just as feminist science and technology studies takes materiality seriously, I take the materiality and craft of writing serious in order to show the complexity of life in contexts of violence where the usual syntax and form do not prove analytically sufficient. My work creatively engages with the vitality and precariousness of life in the everyday grey areas between war and peace.  I was awarded the first place Ethnographic Poetry Award by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, and contributed poetry and methodological conversations to the publication, Arts Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice.   I have also published a creative ethnographic non-fiction and photographic essay with the Center for Imaginative Ethnography at York University. I have been a member of the Center since 2014.  Most recently, I directed a popular education and ethnographic film project based on farmer-to-farmer pedagogy and popular planning of rural life processes in the Colombian Amazon.  The project, Cultivating Living Well in the Colombian Amazon, consists in a series of thirteen short films. I am currently working on my first ethnographic book project tentatively entitled Decomposition as Life Politics: Soil Practitioners and Vital Spaces in the Colombian Amazon, and have published articles in the Journal for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology (forthcoming), as well as an assortment of blogs and op-eds pieces on the U.S.-Colombia War on Drugs and alternative agrarian proposals and political processes in the southwestern province of Putumayo, Colombia.  I have recently joined the faculty at UCSC as assistant professor of Feminist Science Studies with affiliations in Anthropology, Latin American and Latino Studies, and the Science & Justice Research Center.