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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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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