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. 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 also examines the case of Argentina to analyze the social consequences and the environmental suffering brought about by the contemporary “commodity boom” in Latin America.

Soybeans and Power has won the 2017 Best Book Award of the Sociology of Development Section, American Sociological Association.

Other on-going projects involve the impact of genetically modified crops in Latin America; research on riots, repression, and patronage politics in Bolivia; and analyses of occupied workplaces that have been transformed into cooperatives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

He is a member of the editorial boards of Qualitative Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, and the Journal of Agrarian Change. At the University of Georgia, he co-organizes the Georgia Workshop on Culture, Power, and History and the Latin American Sustainable Agriculture Initiative, and he also serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.