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
Sand Artisans
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.