Research

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 major research program examined Argentina’s swift agrarian transformation through the rise of genetically modified soybeans. Across a series of articles and her book, Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina (Duke University Press, 2020), she asked why Argentines largely consent to GM soy despite its social and environmental harms, showing how the state, agribusiness, and their allies deploy narratives of economic redistribution, scientific expertise, and national identity to secure compliance. Seeds of Power won awards from the American Sociological Association and the International Studies Association and an honorable mention from the Latin American Studies Association, and has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.

In a second line of field research, she served as the sociologist on an interdisciplinary team studying the social dynamics of forest conservation and restoration in a protected area of Ecuador. This project supported graduate and undergraduate student research she advised, and produced collaborative work on the drivers of deforestation and the perspectives of the region’s farmers.

Her 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 examines 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.