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Speakers: Kregg Hetherington, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University; Pablo Lapegna, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Georgia; Peggy Rockefeller Visiting Scholar, DRCLAS, Harvard University
Moderated by: Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico
Soybeans are one of the fastest growing monocrops in Latin America. Displacing traditional Latin American crops, soybeans recreate many of the same issues —land struggles, water scarcity, deforestation, pesticide exposure—while their industrial scale creates new and vexing political and environmental problems. Examining two countries, Paraguay and Argentina, these two scholars illustrate how soybeans become integral to the daily life, and death, of local communities, regions, and countries across the Southern Cone.
Kregg Hetherington is a political anthropologist specialized in environment, infrastructure and the bureaucratic state. Kregg's long-term ethnographic work in Paraguay chronicles how small farmers caught in a sweeping agrarian transition have experienced that country's halting transition to democracy, showing how activists create new ways of thinking and practising government. His first book, Guerrilla Auditors, is an ethnography land struggles in Paraguay, and of how rural thinking about property and information come into conflict with bureaucratic reform projects promoted by international experts. The second, award-winning book, The Government of Beans, tells the story of the rise and fall of a progressive government experiment in environmental regulation that attempted to change the relationship between government, plants, people and territory.
Pablo Lapegna teaches and writes about social movements, environmental issues, critical agrarian studies, and global processes, with a focus on South America and using qualitative method. He holds a joint appointment with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute. His award-winning book Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in Argentina (Oxford University Press, 2016) investigates the sweeping expansion of genetically modified soybeans and the ways in which rural population. Lapegna is working on a new project about genetically engineered crops and herbicides in Argentina, in collaboration with Johana Kunin (CONICET and Universidad de San Martín), as a Peggy Rockefeller Visiting Scholar at DRCLAS. This project focuses on the entanglements between people, plants, and pesticides, and seeks to understand how farmers reconcile the economic benefits afforded by genetically engineered crops with the claims about negative environmental impacts and the health risks of pesticide exposure.
Gabriela Soto Laveaga is Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests include modern Latin America, the intersection of science and culture, public health, and scientific and medical exchange in the Global South. Her first book, Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects and the Making of the Pill, won the Robert K. Merton Best Book Prize in Science, Knowledge, and Technology Studies from the American Sociological Association. Her second monograph, Sanitizing Rebellion: Physician Strikes, Public Health and Repression in Twentieth Century Mexico, examines the role of healthcare providers as both critical actors in the formation of modern states and as social agitators. Her latest book project seeks to re-narrate histories of twentieth century agriculture development aid from the point of view of India and Mexico. She has held numerous grants, including those from the Ford, Mellon, Fulbright, DAAD, and Gerda Henkel Foundations. Most recently she was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, 2019-2020.
Presented in collaboration with Department of the History of Science