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 controversies over herbicides in Argentina. GM soybeans are genetically engineered to endure the herbicide glyphosate, which has become involved in a global controversy. In 2015, the IARC (the International Agency for Research on Cancer from the World Health Organization) re-categorized glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Millions of liters of glyphosate-based herbicides are sprayed in Argentina in any given year. The broad question that Dr. Lapegna's new project engages is how farmers, rural workers, public officials, experts, activists, and people in rural towns make sense of the effects of agrochemicals and the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and harms.

Click here to watch a clip for 2020 Recruitment.

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)