Lukas LeyAbout

I’m an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on urban infrastructures, materiality, and social inequality. 
        In urban Java, where I conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I studied the phenomenon of tidal flooding (rob) to understand the production of chronic environmental crisis in late industrialism. My first book Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) was awarded the Social Science Book Prize by the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies. 
       My current research project focuses on the place of sand and other sediments in making urban futures, especially governance responses to land loss and oceanic pollution. In an ongoing side project, I explore coastal repair and fortification with alternative types of concrete. 
        The best way to get in touch with me is via email: ley@eth.mpg.de

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Stirring Up Marseille


Research project
“Stirring up Marseille” is an ongoing research project that links urban transformations in Marseilles to the shifting contours and properties of the Mediterranean seabed. This project is supported by an Emmy Noether grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). 

Research questions: 

  • How do residents become aware and learn about largely invisible underwater remnants of Marseille’s industrial past? How do they access, picture, engage with a polluted sea and a potentially threatening seabed?
  • How do governing entities, e.g. the municipal government, deal with the chemical traces and risk of toxic dispersal when intervening along the coast? 

S.AND – The Future of Coastal Cities in the Indian Ocean

 Research project


Funded by German Research Foundation (DFG) 
Duration: 6 years (2022-2028)
Locations: Denpasar (Indonesia), Bhasan Char (Bangladesh), Mombasa (Kenya), Goa (India), 
Marseilles (France) 
 Since 2022, I lead the DFG research group S.AND – The Future of Coastal Cities in the Indian Ocean. 
        The group thinks with the contemporary socioecological conditions of Indian Ocean port cities and the material faculties of sand to show how this matter organizes and shapes practices of coastal protection. 
        S.AND designed a website to provide regular updates on its research and publish work of a growing network of sand researchers. 
        The project team is based at the Department for Anthropology of Politics and Governance at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. 

Sand Artisans



Writing project
I have been visiting German art exhibitions on the topic of sand since 2022. Following the opening of Sand !Hū Sand at the Kunsthaus Hamburg, the Museum Sinclair-Haus in Bad Homberg or the group exhibition “Indigo Waves and Other Stories” at Berlin’s Gropius Bau all explored the subject from various perspectives. 
        While following the positioning of sand as a vital resource in these projects, I also interview and exchange with curators and artists, such as Jeewi Lee, whose biography, material practice, or research led them to explore the material. 
        I refer to such artists as “sand artisans.” Working with them, I explore the phenomenological and political salience of granular material to gauge the purchase of geological matter on creative imagination and practice.

Coastal Futures: Life amid the brackish  

 Book project
Co-editor: Arne Harms
Funded by the DFG “Shaping Asia” network

Contributors: 
Stephanie Wakefield
Jacqueline Ashkin
Eli Elinoff
Judith Schlehe
Lalitha Kamath
Rasmus Rodineliussen

Essays collected in Coastal Futures portray the coast as a site of confluence marked by contingency and experimentation. In light of climatic changes, contributors show how coastal ecologies figure into urban climate adaptation plans and how coasts consist of porous infrastructural systems that integrate various ecosystems: biodiverse wetlands and intertidal zones get replaced by urban grids, cities build beyond land, and urban neighbourhoods turn into islands. 
        The volume pays close attention to what “coastal” actually signifies, how such meanings change over time, travel, and when new forms of knowing the coast – scientific, ritualistic, bureaucratic, environmentalist – crop up or get mobilized. In sum, contributions speak to a renewed interest in coasts as chokepoints of global mobilities and commodity flows and alluring zones of climate change endangerment.

Training



I’m involved in various professional training and mentoring activities. After teaching anthropology at the University of Heidelberg, I built a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. At the moment, I supervise the following PhD projects:

  • Javed Kaisar: “Grains in Motion: Sedimented Politics and the Becoming of Bhasan Char”
  • Tarini Monga: “Shifting Shoreline: infrastructure, material relations and sand uses in urban India”
  • Teresa Cremer: “Sand matters: Unearthing socio-ecological dynamics of coastal transformation in Mombasa, Kenya”
  • Franziska Nicolaisen: Designing Future Cities in Contemporary Vietnam: Workplace Ethnography of Vietnamese Architects and Planners

A list of taught graduate courses:

  • Anthropology of Sand: Environments, Materialism, Urbanity
  • Anthropology of Water Disrupted: Infrastructures of the Urban
  • Political Anthropology
    Old and New Anthropologies of Water

I designed and taught the following undergraduate courses:

  • Decolonial Anthropology 
  • Pandemic Infrastructures
  • Introduction to Political Anthropology
  • The Culture and Politics of Infrastructure in Indonesia 
  • Urban Ethnography
  • Introduction to Urban Anthropology
  • Anthropology of Climate Change
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