Jessie Luna

Colorado State University | CSU · Department of Sociology

This chapter reviews the topic of environmental inequality in Africa, with a particular focus on West Africa and the country of Burkina Faso. We address a broad tendency in mainstream approaches to African environmental issues of ignoring questions of inequality and downplaying the historical, social, political, and economic drivers of environmenta...

For decades, critical agri-food scholarship has sought to evaluate the outcomes of alternative agri-food systems such as organic. Two key critiques have emerged: the first focuses on the limitations of certification-based systems that rely on a neoliberal model of consumer concern; the second critique highlights the Whiteness of alternative food mo...

Pesticides and toxicity are constitutive features of modernization in Africa, despite ongoing portrayals of the continent as “too poor to pollute.” This article examines social science scholarship on agricultural pesticide expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa. We recount the rise of agrochemical usage in colonial projects that placed African smallholder...

Burkina Faso’s 2008 Bt cotton adoption was Africa’s largest genetically modified (GM) crop introduction principally for small farmers, and became its most celebrated success story. In 2016, however, Burkina Faso announced an abrupt phase-out of Bt cotton, citing millions of dollars of losses due to inferior lint quality. In hindsight, quality issue...

Amidst polarized global debates about genetically modified (GM) crops, much attention has focused on Burkina Faso, where farmers grew Bt cotton from 2008 to 2015 in the first widespread commercial adoption of GM crops by smallholder African farmers. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork and 125 interviews to analyse the debate accompanying t...

Amidst broad debates about the “New Green Revolution” in Africa, input-intensive agriculture is on the rise in some parts of Africa. This paper examines the underlying drivers of the recent and rapid adoption of herbicides and genetically modified seeds in the Burkina Faso cotton sector. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Houndé r...

In contemporary Western countries, thin, fit, and “healthy” bodies operate as important markers of social status. This paper draws together Foucauldian and Bourdieusian literatures on this topic to investigate how “embodied neoliberalism” (internalized individualism and self-responsibility) intersects with performances of “embodied cultural capital...

This paper examines how intersectional inequalities can facilitate the extraction of surplus value from agriculture. Through an ethnographic case study of the Burkina Faso cotton sector, I describe a ‘chain of exploitation’ wherein actors pass economic pressures on to less-powerful actors. People resist their own exploitation, yet justify exploitin...

Scholarship on environmental inequality has long focused on racial inequalities in exposure to environmental pollution. In explaining this, previous scholarship has identified mechanisms such as intentional discrimination, structural and institutional racism, and dynamics of political power. Here, I demonstrate an additional mechanism: that racist...

Research on the environmental dimensions of human migration has made important strides in recent years. However, findings have been spread across multiple disciplines with wide-ranging methodologies and limited theoretical development. This article reviews key findings of the field and identifies future directions for sociological research. We cont...