My research focuses on everyday life at the edge of chemically-intensive agroindustrial economies in California’s Central Coast region. I examine how diverse actors within this region articulate their encounters with the spatially and temporally expansive agropesticides.

My dissertation examines the intersection between agricultural pesticides and Latino children’s development in Monterey County’s agricultural regions—one of the country’s most productive and chemically intense regions. Doing so, it examines how concerned local groups mobilize scientific, local, and embodied knowledges to articulate and denounce critical or sensitive periods of development and sensitive areas (i.e., school sites) where life courses are chemically altered, and collective futures traced to sustain order.

Drawing from data collected over three years, it follows different actors including farmworkers, community leaders, affected residents, NGOs and scientists through diverse settings such as community meetings, scientific meetings, educational events, rallies, and so on. This study demonstrates how these critical temporalities and spaces become significant points for emergent practices of care in the re-imagining and re-configuring of more just and sustainable possibilities.

TOXIC EVERYDAY LANDSCAPES

MAPPING PESTICIDES

DISABLING ECOLOGIES