Doctoral Dissertation Research: Race, Plantation Agriculture and the Environmental Politics of Pesticide Use and Regulation

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This project investigates how the history of plantation agriculture and pesticide-intensive agricultural development shape contemporary practices of pesticide use and regulation. The project places alternate framings of pesticides - as indispensable to agricultural production or as unacceptable environmental pollutants - within the context of the racial legacy of plantation agriculture. By centering race as a factor agricultural and environmental politics, this project seeks to advance understanding of the relationship between rural inequality and environmental change. It asks how the racial politics of the plantation impacted early development of pesticides as an agricultural technology; how historic tensions between agricultural productivity and racial equity contributed to current structures of agro-environmental regulation; and how different narratives of agricultural change connected to race relations inform contemporary debates over the use and regulation of pesticides. Placing the dual objectives of racial equity and agricultural productivity at the center of inquiry, the project provides a policy-relevant analysis of the obstacles to and opportunities for greater environmental and social sustainability through agricultural practices. Oral histories produced through this study will be archived, and made publically available, in order to expand public knowledge and inform future research. The findings of the study will be shared widely through both scholarly articles and publications for broader audiences in order to deepen understanding of the relationship between environmental justice and contemporary agricultural production.The study is positioned at the intersection of scholarship on political ecology, environmental justice, and agrarian studies. Through a case study in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, one of the world's most pesticide-intensive regions during the mid-20th century and a highly productive agricultural region in the present day, the research will ask how the politics of pesticide usage in agricultural production and environmental regulation reproduce, or challenge, the historical racial politics of the plantation. In order to provide a textured history of the role of pesticides in the production of racially unequal spaces, the project draws upon oral history methodologies and archival research. Through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the study also examines how this history informs contemporary uses and understandings of pesticides in the present day. By connecting historical inquiry with contemporary research, this project will enrich understandings of the historical determinants of contemporary agro-environmental practices, while centering race as a key factor in environmental change.