Event Description
Through an interdisciplinary approach, the Latin American Natures in Times of Environmental Crisis event series interrogates how people from different positionalities in the region address pressing environmental issues. Over three installments throughout the academic year, we will hear from scholars who, in their forms of researching, writing, and engaged scholarship, are studying struggles for territorial and water rights, dignified livelihoods, food sovereignty, and environmental knowledge. This series emphasizes how approaching these pressing environmental problems involves an articulation of humans and more-than humans. This installment has two components: a hybrid in person/online talk (April 10), and a workshop (April 11) led by the guest speaker and open to graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty who sign up. The lecture-workshop framework allows participants to collaborate with and learn from our invited speaker how to advance research on nature and politics in Latin America.
Small, landlocked, and highly unstable at the beginning of the 20th century, Paraguay might seem an odd country to be targeted as one of the first recipients of Green Revolution investments. And yet its uncertain loyalties during WWII, and its relative impoverishment in the region made it an ideal experiment for the U.S. Department of State and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1943. It also assured that these investments would have an outsized effect on the country’s scientific infrastructure. The 20th century history of Paraguayan science, tethered to a very specific narrative of progress, make it an ideal place for thinking about the temporality of facts, how it shifts with changing geopolitical ambitions, and multiplies as facts break loose of their original intent.
Speaker
Kregg Hetherington is Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology at the Concordia University. He is a political anthropologist specializing in environment, infrastructure, and the bureaucratic state. Hetherington’s 2020 book, The Government of Beans, begins with the question of how to understand soybeans as the most significant political actor in Paraguay over the last two decades. The book employs multiple narrative strategies to try to rethink what government is in the age of runaway monocrops. His current research, in a very different site, looks at the way different forms of water participate in urban life in Montreal. Both of these projects, while engaging with anthropocenic changes at planetary scales, are fundamentally about the intimate cosmopolitics of everyday life, of ecological relations and regulatory action.
Cosponsors
Presented by the Latin American & Caribbean Socionatures Working Group, with cosponsorship support and funding from the CLAS Event Series Grant.