Edgework

Lukas Ley is an environmental anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, where he leads the DFG-funded Emmy Noether research group on the infrastructural lives of sand in port cities of the Afrasian Sea. His research is concerned with urban marginalization, temporality, and material environments. Ley’s first book, Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang, was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2021 and was awarded the Social Science Prize by the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies.