Lukas Ley is an environmental and urban anthropologist working at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, where he leads a DFG-funded Emmy Noether research group on the infrastructural lives of sand in the Indian Ocean World. His research is broadly concerned with marginalization, temporality, and the material environment within urban landscapes. Current research projects investigate the role of sand in protecting urban commons and driving dispossession in Denpasar, Indonesia, and the future of concrete in Marseille, France. Ley’s first book, “Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang” published by University of Minnesota Press in 2021, was awarded the Social Science Prize by
European Association for Southeast Asian Studies and received an Honorable Mention for the Harry J. Benda Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.