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.
