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 (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 and the Journal of Agrarian Change. At the University of Georgia, he co-organizes the Georgia Workshop on Culture, Power, and History at the Department of Sociology, and Dirty History, an interdisciplinary workshop on agriculture, the environment, and capitalism. He also leads the Latin American Sustainable Agriculture Initiative at LACSI. He is a faculty affiliate with the Sustainability Certificate Program and the Center for Integrative Conservation Research.

Dr. Lapegna is working on a new project about genetically engineered crops and herbicides in Argentina, in collaboration with Dr. Johana Kunin (CONICET and Universidad de San Martín, UNSAM, Argentina). This project focuses on the entanglements between people, plants, and pesticides to address a set of questions: How do farmers reconcile the economic benefits afforded by genetically engineered crops with the claims about negative environmental impacts and the health risks of pesticide exposure? What do contemporary agriculture and its dependency on pesticides reveal about the promises and perils of technology in the Anthropocene? How do the actions of non-humans (such as pesticides, soils, weeds, and the climate) de-centers humans in our understanding of the world and its futures? Understanding farmers on their own terms and dwelling on their ambivalent views of pesticides, this project bridges interdisciplinary scholarship on toxicity, care practices, narratives of justification, non-human actors, and morality and ethics. A publication about this project can be found here.

Click here to watch a presentation on "The Politics of GM Crops and Agrochemical Exposure in Argentina" at the Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development, Atlanta.

Click here to watch an interview at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Lima, Peru (In Spanish)