Organized by:
Lucía Argüelles, Postdoctoral Researcher, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
Brian Williams, Assistant Professor, Mississippi State University.
As technologies definitionally targeting organisms deemed threatening or surplus, pesticides are oriented toward managing and controlling ecologies through death, and favoring some forms of life over others (Guthman 2017, Hetherington 2020). Yet the travels of these compounds are never limited to the organisms that they target. Pesticides reshape political ecologies, and are imbricated in unequal geographies of exposure and agricultural profitability at a range of scales, from the field to the global. In reconfiguring relations between people and other organisms, pesticides act upon existing geographies of risk, profit and power (Werner et al. in press). Moreover, the chemical targeting of organisms as “weeds” and “pests” contribute to or undermine relations with the more-than-human world (Guthman 2019). Through this session, we hope to connect historical and contemporary political ecologies of pesticides with work anticipating contemporary shifts (e.g. regulation changes and shifts in political agendas, emerging technologies). By drawing these connections, we hope to contribute to the envisioning and cultivation of abundant futures (Collard et al. 2015) beyond the global pesticides complex.
We seek to bring together political ecologists working to understand and address the socially-uneven more-than-human dynamics of chemicals and regulatory regimes through innovative theoretical and empirical lenses. Papers might address, for example, the following questions:
-How can we theorize the relationship between the intended uses of chemicals and their putatively unintended social and ecological consequences?
- What political-ecological dynamics shape the racially- and geographically-uneven harms of chemicals? How might political-ecological attention to chemicals contribute to understanding and challenging environmental privilege, environmental racism, and the environmental dimensions of colonialism?
-How do regulatory frameworks surrounding chemicals serve to value, devalue, or quantify lives, and how does the uneven valuation of lives shape production regimes and practices?
-What socio-ecological relations are displaced or supplanted by the usage of chemicals? Can the use of synthetic pesticides coexist with normative commitments to environmental justice, polycultural practices, and multi-species flourishing? How have actors navigated these tensions?
-How are global or regional pesticide assemblages shifting? How do shifts in chemical regimes (for example, towards more intensive use of chemicals or a reduction of chemicals) shape broader power relations in agriculture? Can shifts away from chemicals (e.g. through technology 4.0) intensify agro-environmental inequalities?
Please send titles and abstracts of up to 300 words to Lucía Argüelles larguellesr@uoc.edu and Brian Williams bsw63@msstate.edu by Dec 10.
References:
Collard, Rosemary-Claire, Jessica Dempsey, and Juanita Sundberg. 2015. “A Manifesto for Abundant Futures.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105 (2): 322–30.
Guthman, Julie. 2017. “Life Itself under Contract: Rent-Seeking and Biopolitical Devolution through Partnerships in California’s Strawberry Industry.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44 (1): 100–117.
Guthman, Julie. 2019. Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry. Oakland, California: University of California Press.
Hetherington, Kregg. 2020. “Agribiopolitics: The Health of Plants and Humans in the Age of Monocrops.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38 (4): 682–98.
Werner, Marion, Christian Berndt, and Becky Mansfield. In press. “The Glyphosate Assemblage: Herbicides, Uneven Development, and Chemical Geographies of Ubiquity.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers.