Seminar in Critical Development Studies: Caitlyn Sears

About the speaker

Caitlyn Sears (she/her) is a postdoctoral associate with the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) at Cornell University. She was the recipient of the National Science Foundation Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences fellowship for her work on the Malaysian pesticide industry and its role in global agrochemical production networks. Her work combines development and economic geography to focus on and analyze south-south relationships of trade, cooperation and regulation, and how they shape and reinforce axes of uneven development. She is part of a group of scholars and activists, Pesticide Research Network, working together to explore the geography of global pesticide production, trade, use and regulation and how these changes affect ecologies and human health.

Abstract:

This talk draws on the 1981 publication on the circle of poison, an observation about pesticide trade, use, and power in global food systems, to discuss the uneven geographies of regulation and harm and exposure. Recent data on pesticides show production has increasingly shifted to countries in the so-called global south, while global north countries import and use these inputs at higher rates. Meanwhile, producing countries ban more and more of these pesticides. To add, exposure remains unevenly distributed on already vulnerable populations worldwide. Paraquat, an acutely toxic herbicide, offers an interesting lens to analyze the relationship between regulation and harm and exposure. Therefore, in this talk, I discuss the recent data on paraquat use in the United States along with data on national bans and global frameworks to regulate the herbicide to show how the circle of poison observation is still useful to scholarship today. I ultimately argue that the uneven geography of pesticides’ effects is not neatly separable from the politics of their regulation.

About the series

The Critical Development Studies Seminar Series is a graduate student-led effort that aims to provide space for junior scholars to share innovative research and discuss emergent debates within critical development studies.

Invited speakers cover a range of geographical areas, disciplinary backgrounds, and research topics. Examples of potential topics include agroecology and food justice issues, state-building, land and labor, extractivist politics, the gendered and racial dynamics of ongoing capitalist development, and the political ecological histories of the global development project. The target audience for the series is graduate students and faculty interested in critical development studies both within the Cornell community as well as external scholars. 

Seminar organizers for 2025-26 are Eve Devillers, Jessie Whittaker Mayall, Aaron Benanav, and Mariah Doyle-Stephenson.