Kregg Hetherington

BA Hons.(Concordia University), MA (Dalhousie University), PhD (University of California, Davis).

Email                                        Phone

kregg.hetherington@dal.ca            (902) 494-6754

Location

McCain Building, Room 1124

Profile

Dr. Kregg Hetherington is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on environmental politics, bureaucracy and international development in Latin America. He is interested in how environmental knowledge becomes politicized during moments of rapid social change and on the frontier between expert and lay forms of knowledge. This means looking at how institutions authorize some ways of knowing the environment over others and how they shift to adapt to new environmental and political conditions. His book, Guerrilla Auditors, is an ethnography of peasant land struggles in Paraguay, and how rural thinking about property and information come into conflict with bureaucratic reform projects promoted by international experts. His current SSHRC-funded research focuses on the way the soybean boom in Latin America’s southern cone is transforming how governments understand their role in agriculture.  In Paraguay, the government of beans has precipitated a struggle over how to understand and control the relationship between humans and plants, reshaping the state in the process. 

Dr. Hetherington is currently looking to hire graduate research assistants whose projects are focused on Latin America, environmental politics or ethnography of the state.

Primary research foci

•     Environmental, agricultural and rural politics
•     Legal, political and economic transitions
•     Politics of scientific and expert knowledge and government regulation
•     Social movements, international development and the state
•     Corruption, transparency and bureaucracy
•     Paraguayan history and politics

Books

2011.  Guerrilla Auditors: Transparency, Democracy and Ruiral Politics in post-Cold War Paraguay. Durham: Duke University Press.

2011.   Privatizando lo Privado: Lotes Precarios y la materialidad de los derechos. Asunción: Intercontinental Editora.  (Traducción de Marco Castillo.) 

2005 Cultivating Utopia: Organic Farmers in a Conventional Landscape. Halifax: Fernwood Press.

Articles

2012   “Promising Information: Cadastral Reform and Development Expertise in Latin America.”  Forthcoming in Economy and Society.