Dr Javier Lezaun
![J lezaun ias photo j lezaun ias photo](https://www.insis.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mt_image_medium/public/anthro/images/media/j_lezaun_ias_photo.jpg?itok=s_VKrTE2)
Javier Lezaun is Associate Professor in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS).
Javier’s research lies at the intersection of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). His work explores the interplay of scientific and political change
Contact
Email: javier.lezaun@insis.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)1865 288943
I am an Anthropologist of Science, trained in Science and Technology Studies, and interested in the interplay between technological and political change. My research focuses on the multiple types of experimental activities through which we produce knowledge about the world, and what happens when we try to put that knowledge to use.
Over the last two decades, most of my work has taken place in the context of biomedical and global health research efforts, often in collaboration with scientists from other disciplines. This has included studies of the organization of pharmaceutical research and development, as in my ERC-funded project Bioproperty (Biomedical Research and the Future of Property Right), and work on scientific knowledge production during disease outbreaks, as in my research on the Zika emergency in Brazil.
A consistent focus of interest has been the attempt to control mosquitoes and the diseases they carry. I have worked with medical entomologists in a variety of projects in Tanzania, Burkina Faso Brazil and Venezuela, studying how they generate new insights about mosquitoes, and the challenges they face when they try to translate these insights into effective control tools. This work informs my book Pragmatic Vectors: Field Guide for a New Global Health, written with Ann Kelly and forthcoming with Duke University Press.
The most recent research project in this area concerns leishmaniasis – another disease transmitted by an insect vector. As part of the British Academy-funded project Diseased Landscapes, and in collaboration with colleagues at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, I am exploring the connections between leishmaniasis, agrarian systems, and armed conflict.
In recent years, my research has become increasingly concerned with climate change as a scientific and political problem. I am a co-Investigator in the Oxford Net Zero programme, and currently direct several research projects on inclusive net zero transitions. A key focus of my own work in this area is the development of carbon removal and sequestration technologies. Specifically, how emerging infrastructures to remove CO2 from the atmosphere can be made compatible with sustainable development goals, and contribute to an equitable phase out of fossil fuel extraction (rather than to its continuing expansion). At the moment this includes research on ocean-based methods of carbon sequestration, as in the European OceanNETs consortium, and new projects on soil and geological carbon sequestration in Mexico and Kenya.
I serve on a number of editorial and scientific advisory bodies, including UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee.
Javier is currently teaching the option course Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, as well as occasional lectures in the Medical Anthropology MSc and the Human Sciences BA.
He welcomes enquiries from individuals wishing to undertake doctoral or post-doctoral research in STS and/or the Anthropology of Science, particularly on topics relating to global health and climate change.
Nawaz, Sara, and Javier Lezaun. "Grappling with a sea change: Tensions in expert imaginaries of marine carbon dioxide removal." Global Environmental Change 85 (2024): 102806.
Valenzuela, Jose Maria, and Javier Lezaun. "Publics and counter-publics of net-zero." Futures 156 (2024): 103322.
Khosla, Radhika, Javier Lezaun, A. M. McGivern, and Jessica Omukuti. "Can ‘Net Zero’still be an instrument of climate justice?" Environmental Research Letters 18, no. 6 (2023).
Fankhauser, Sam, Stephen M. Smith, Myles Allen, Kaya Axelsson, Thomas Hale, Cameron Hepburn, J. Michael Kendall et al. "The meaning of net zero and how to get it right." Nature Climate Change 12, no. 1 (2022): 15-21.
Kelly, Ann H., Javier Lezaun, and Alice Street. "Global health, accelerated: Rapid diagnostics and the fragile solidarities of ‘emergency R&D’." Economy and Society 51, no. 2 (2022): 187-210.
Kelly, Ann H., and Javier Lezaun. "The immune home: domestic enclaves, diffuse protections." Cultural Anthropology 36, no. 4 (2021): 563-572.
Kameda, Koichi, Ann H. Kelly, Javier Lezaun, and Ilana Löwy. "Imperfect diagnosis: The truncated legacies of Zika testing." Social Studies of Science 51, no. 5 (2021): 683-706.
Kelly, Ann H., Javier Lezaun, Ilana Löwy, Gustavo Corrêa Matta, Carolina de Oliveira Nogueira, and Elaine Teixeira Rabello. "Uncertainty in times of medical emergency: Knowledge gaps and structural ignorance during the Brazilian Zika crisis." Social Science & Medicine 246 (2020): 112787.
Bellamy, Rob, Javier Lezaun, and James Palmer. “Perceptions of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage in different policy scenarios.” Nature Communications 10, no. 1 (2019): 743.
Lezaun, Javier. "The deferred promise of radical cure: pharmaceutical conjugations of malaria in the global health era." Economy and Society 47, no. 4 (2018): 547-571.
Kelly, Ann H., and Javier Lezaun. "The wild indoors: Room-spaces of scientific inquiry." Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 3 (2017): 367-398.
Bellamy, R., & Lezaun, J. (2017). “Crafting a public for geoengineering.” Public Understanding of Science, 26(4), 402-417.
Bellamy, Rob, Javier Lezaun, and James Palmer. "Public perceptions of geoengineering research governance: An experimental deliberative approach." Global Environmental Change 45 (2017): 194-202.
Lezaun, Javier, and Fabian Muniesa. "Twilight in the leadership playground: subrealism and the training of the business self." Journal of Cultural Economy 10, no. 3 (2017): 265-279.
Lezaun, Javier, Noortje Marres, and Manuel Tironi. "Experiments in participation." The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies 4 (2016): 195-221.
Lezaun, Javier, and Catherine M. Montgomery. "The pharmaceutical commons: Sharing and exclusion in global health drug development." Science, Technology, & Human Values 40, no. 1 (2015): 3-29.
Kelly, Ann H., and Javier Lezaun. "Urban mosquitoes, situational publics, and the pursuit of interspecies separation in Dar es Salaam." American Ethnologist 41, no. 2 (2014): 368-383.
Lezaun, Javier, and Nerea Calvillo. “In the Political Laboratory: Kurt Lewin's Atmospheres.” Journal of Cultural Economy 7, no. 4 (2014): 434-457.
Lezaun, Javier, Fabian Muniesa, and Signe Vikkelsø. "Provocative containment and the drift of social-scientific realism." Journal of Cultural Economy 6, no. 3 (2013): 278-293.
Woolgar, Steve, and Javier Lezaun. "The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology studies?" Social Studies of Science 43, no. 3 (2013): 321-340.