Amalia Leguizamón

Amalia Leguizamón is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies for the City, Culture, and Community PhD Program. She is also a core faculty member at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and a member of the Environmental Studies Faculty Advisory Committee.

Research Interests

Dr. Leguizamón is an environmental sociologist whose work centers on the political economy of the environment in Latin America. She examines the power dynamics behind development and climate change and their uneven consequences for people and ecosystems, drawing on political ecology, development sociology, and agrarian and food studies.

Her first book, Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina (Duke University Press, 2020), examines why Argentines largely consent to genetically modified soy despite its social and environmental harms. It won awards from the American Sociological Association and the International Studies Association, along with an honorable mention from the Latin American Studies Association, and has been translated into Spanish (Las semillas del poder, UNSAM Edita, 2022) and Portuguese (Sementes de poder, Elefante Editora, 2023).

Current Research

Dr. Leguizamón’s current work develops the concept of climate coloniality: the ways that climate change, and the solutions proposed to address it, can extend longer histories of colonial inequality in Latin America. She is co-editing a collection of essays on climate coloniality in Latin America and writing a manuscript that explores how conservation and education initiatives framed as climate action can reproduce colonial relations.

Her work increasingly turns toward Latin America’s place in global commodity chains and the infrastructures and water systems that sustain them, questions she is beginning to explore through a new course, “Latin America and the Climate Crisis,” which she will teach for the first time in Spring 2027.

Selected Publications

Book

Leguizamón, Amalia. 2020. Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

Leguizamón, Amalia. 2026. “The Future of Food.” In Environmental Sociology Now. University of California Press.

Leguizamón, Amalia. 2025. “Corporations and the Environment.” In Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology. Oxford University Press.

Leguizamón, Amalia. 2023. “The Political Economy of the Environment in Latin America.” In Routledge Handbook of Latin America and the Environment.

Leguizamón, Amalia. 2016. “Disappearing Nature? Agribusiness, Biotechnology, and Distance in Argentine Soybean Production.” Journal of Peasant Studies 43 (2): 313¬–330.

Leguizamón, Amalia. 2014. “Modifying Argentina: GM Soy and Socio-Environmental Change.” Geoforum 53: 149–160.