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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Fertile Lands And Bodies: Connecting The Green Revolution, Pesticides, And Women’S Reproductive Health, Sarah M.K. Cycon Apr 2013

Fertile Lands And Bodies: Connecting The Green Revolution, Pesticides, And Women’S Reproductive Health, Sarah M.K. Cycon

Pitzer Senior Theses

Environmentalists, social scientists, and economists have long critiqued the enduring impacts of the Green Revolution’s diffusion of agricultural technologies throughout the Global South. However, largely missing from the myriad analyses is the relationship between those technologies, namely pesticides, and health outcomes. This thesis explores the social and biological mechanisms through which excessive pesticide use culminated into adverse reproductive health outcomes for rural women in the Global South. Drawing together the history of the Green Revolution’s use of DDT, its social and economic impacts, and the biology of pesticide contamination in women’s bodies exposes how the Green Revolution situated women in …


Decolonizing Ecology Through Rerooting Epistemologies, Lauren M. Bitter Apr 2013

Decolonizing Ecology Through Rerooting Epistemologies, Lauren M. Bitter

Pitzer Senior Theses

My project is centered around a community garden in Upland, California called the People and Their Plants garden. This garden represents a five hundred year living history designed to show the changes in the ecological landscape of Southern California caused by colonization. This autoethnographic thesis works towards personal, interpersonal, and community-wide decolonization through building reciprocal relationships with Indigenous Elders. I explore, critique and problematize research and ethnography by examining the politics of knowledge, language, history, and ecology. I interrogate my own learned knowledge systems as well as colonial/capitalist food systems—and recognize how those systems/relations have worked to render Indigenous ways …