Pablo Lapegna

Dr. Pablo Lapegna obtained his Licenciatura in Sociology from the University of Buenos Aires, and his PhD in Sociology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He teaches and writes about social movements, environmental issues, critical agrarian studies, and global processes, with a focus on South America and using qualitative methods (see "Research" below for publications). He holds a joint appointment with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute.

His 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 populations think, feel, and act when affected by environmental problems and quotidian hardships. Drawing on ethnography and focusing on northern Argentina, the book scrutinizes mechanisms of demobilization and the decline of contention in cases of agrochemical exposure. Soybeans and Power has won the 2017 Best Book Award of the Sociology of Development Section, American Sociological Association, and it has been published in Spanish as La Argentina Transgénica: De la Resistencia a la Adaptación, una Etnografía de las Poblaciones Campesinas (Siglo XXI Editores, Buenos Aires, 2019). See media coverage here, here, here, here, here, and here.

He is a member of the editorial boards of Qualitative Sociology, the Journal of Agrarian Change, and the University of Georgia Press. At the University of Georgia, he co-organizes Dirty History, an interdisciplinary workshop on agriculture, the environment, and capitalism. He is a faculty affiliate with the Sustainability Certificate Program and the Center for Integrative Conservation Research, and a fellow on the Grant Development Program of the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research.

Dr. Lapegna is currently working on a new project about herbicides in Argentina, in collaboration with Dr. Johana Kunin (from CONICET and Universidad de San Martín in Argentina). This project focuses on how farmers reconcile the economic benefits afforded by their use of herbicides in genetically engineered crops and the claims about the negative environmental impacts and health risks of pesticides. It also investigates the interactions between farmers and non-humans, like crops, soils, weeds, and the climate. Publications about this project can be found here and here. In 2022-23, Dr. Lapegna worked on this project as a visiting scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University. In 2024, the National Endowment for the Humanities provided generous funding for this project through its program "Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities."