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Lisa Stevenson is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. She received her PhD in 2005 from the University of California, Berkeley. In recent years a central focus of her work has been the question of what it means to think in images. As an anthropologist she has attempted to trace and describe such imagistic forms of thought in the everyday worlds of people in situations of violence—among the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic and among Colombian refugees in Ecuador. Her book Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014) won the 2015 Victor Turner Book Prize and the 2020 Staley Prize. Her short film, Into Unknown Parts, which debuted at the Margaret Mead Film Festival (2017) concerns the Inuit experience of being forced to leave their home communities and live for an undetermined period of time in a southern tuberculosis sanatorium. Her recent work among Colombian refugees in Ecuador engages experimental theatre techniques (in collaboration with Cristiana Giordano) to find new imagistic ways of thinking and representing the violence of everyday life. Stevenson is currently a Mellon New Directions Fellow, studying filmmaking in order to better use the power of film to capture the lived experience of violence.


Still from The Spirit Life, made in collaboration with Manari Ushigua, Fabiano Kueva and Eduardo Kohn.