The political shaping of scientific fields in Argentina’s Pesticide Conflict: Evidence from domain-topic model analysis.

ARANCIBIA FLORENCIA; SCOTT FRICKEL; HANNUD ABDO ALEXANDRE

Philadelphia

Congreso; 118th Annual Meeting: The educative power of sociology; 2023

American Sociological Association (ASA)

Part of a larger, ethnographic and interview-based study of experts and expertnetworks in the Argentina’s pesticide conflict, this paper investigates therelationship between two processes that unfolded simultaneously during 2000-2020: the development of the anti-spraying movement and the emergence of a newnational scientific field on the health and environmental effects of pesticides. Tounderstand how mobilized experts have shaped the scope and direction ofArgentine pesticide research we employ domain-topic models to analyze abibliographic corpus of scientific publications of Argentine researchers collectedfrom the Web of Science Core Collection (1990-2023). We describe the thematicand relational structure of Argentine pesticide research and, subsequently, locatethose research domains aligned with the interests of the anti-spraying movement tofollow and characterize the participation of previously identified scientists alliedwith the movement. Our theoretical goal is to advance two novel theories within thePolitical Sociology of Science that propose a network based, symmetricalinstitutional analysis of the dynamics and impacts of expert activism.