Dr Lys Alcayna-Stevens
Associate Professor in Medical Anthropology
Unit Affiliation
Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology
College Affiliation
St Catherine's College
Contact
Supervision
Lys is available for supervision
Bio
Lys completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Before coming to Oxford, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut Pasteur and the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale (Collège de France) in Paris, and a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven, Belgium. She has also been a lecturer at the New School for Social Research in New York, and a Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department of Harvard University, working on projects in collaboration with interdisciplinary teams of researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg.
In 2023, she was the Evans-Pritchard Lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford.
Interests
Lys is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research is situated at the intersection of medical anthropology, political ecology, multispecies ethnography, and science and technology studies (STS).
Her ethnographic focus is on central Africa, with extensive ethnographic research in rural Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ultimately, her research has sought to understand medical humanitarianism and environmental conservation in central Africa as they relate to global economic, environmental and political processes, while also attending to the very local debates they engender concerning obligation, value, power, and resistance.
She has worked on the social, political and economic impacts of Ebola epidemics; issues of environmental justice; vaccine hesitancy in the context of epidemics; great apes and the scientists who study them; and anthropological approaches to 'growth' and 'degrowth'. She also has research interests in gendered bodies and reproductive (in)justice, and commitments to feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and decolonial approaches.
For the academic year, 2026-27, she is the Course Director of the Medical Anthropology Master's programmes.
Key Publiations
More
Lys' research and teaching engages issues of resource extraction, environmental conservation, health and disease, economic inequality, and histories of racial capitalism in colonial and postcolonial Africa.
She currently teaches Critical Medical Anthropology (Theory/Praxis), Ecologies of Disease, and Human Ecology.
Her current and past research projects are summarized below, and links to the resulting publications can be found under ‘explore more'.
Epidemic disease and medical humanitarianism
This book project takes the 2014-20 Ebola outbreaks in the Equateur and Tshuapa provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo as its empirical focus. It examines the political economy of Ebola and what has come to be known as ‘Ebola Business': conspiracy theories that Ebola has been manufactured so that local and national politicians, rebel leaders and humanitarians can profit from the millions of dollars spent on the response.
Growth and Degrowth
Lys led the EU-funded ‘POSTGROWTH' project from 2022-23, which sought engage with an urgent challenge: How can the research of social scientists contribute to facilitating the kind of radical economic and political reorganizations necessary for reduced resource use on a global scale? The project explored the contributions offered by contemporary anthropologists to debates surrounding growth and Degrowth.
Environmental justice
Lys' research on the environment examines how environmental politics are enacted and debated in the everyday lives of rural Congolese (in relation to logging, agribusiness and the creation of protected areas), and follows the ways in which justice and injustice are mobilized by different political actors. This work will appear in a collection which Lys is editing exploring the interconnected ecological, cultural, and geopolitical dynamics of the Congo Basin.
Conceptualizing the social beyond the human
Lys' earliest research sought to explore the social and affective bonds between chimpanzees and their caretakers in a Catalonian primate sanctuary, and to explore the ways in which ethnographic approaches can shed light on the multiple and contradictory positions people take on animal ‘perspectives'. Later research examined the relationships between animal behaviour scientists and the wild great apes they study in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Engaging with feminist geographies of environmental crisis, this research has attempted to rethink the kinds of labour required to do scientific research, to theorize modes of thinking and relating which are embodied, introspective and uncertain, and to conceptualize sociality beyond the human in ways which can account for alterity, asymmetry and indeterminacy.
Priya Sajjid (2024)
The Dramaturgy of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Pakistan: Denial, Managing Uncertainty, Negotiating Public Response, and Retrospection
2021 Alcayna-Stevens, L. 2021. ‘Thinking in forests' in Environmental Alterities, Walford & Bonelli (eds.). London: Mattering Press. ISBN: 978-1-912729-14-2.
2020 Alcayna-Stevens, L. & Dam, H-Y. 2020. ‘Primates : Introduction.' Cahiers d'Anthropologie Sociale 18: pp. 9-24. doi:10.3917/cas.018.0009
2018 Narat, V. Alcayna-Stevens, L. Rupp, S. Giles-Vernick, T. 2018. ‘Rethinking human–nonhuman primate “contact” and pathogenic disease spillover'. EcoHealth Dec;14(4):840-850. doi: 10.1007/s10393-017-1283-4.
2016 Alcayna-Stevens, L. ‘Habituating field scientists.' 2016. Social Studies of Science 46(6): pp. 833-853. doi: 10.1177/0306312716669251.
2012 Candea, M. & Alcayna-Stevens, L. 2012. ‘Introduction: Internal others'. Special section: Cambridge Anthropology 30(2), Autumn 2012: pp. 36–47. https://doi.org/10.3167/ca.2012.300203.
2012 Alcayna-Stevens, L. 2012. ‘Inalienable worlds: Inter-species relations, perspectives and ‘doublethink' in a Catalonian chimpanzee sanctuary'. Cambridge Anthropology 30(2), Autumn 2012: pp. 82–100. doi: 10.3167/ca.2012.300206.
2009 Alcayna-Stevens, L. 2009. ‘”In the shadow of man”: Pan-human perspectives in a Catalonian chimpanzee sanctuary'. Cambridge Anthropology 28(1): pp. 1-33.
