ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

When Bodies Remember What Documents Forget: Agricultural Risk and Epistemic Erasure in El Ejido

• In Event: Legitimating Agricultural Risk: Science, Bodies and Knowledge Across Global Farming

English Abstract

This paper introduces an ongoing research project that seeks to addresses a persistent obstacle in understanding the causal relationship between intensive agriculture and farmers' health risks: the historical and structural disconnect between official risk assessments-based on mobile, standardized, and decontextualized datasets-and the embodied experiences of harm among those working within agricultural production systems. Focusing on the agricultural enclave of El Ejido (Spain), the world's largest concentration of plastic greenhouses and a key site of European agri-food modernization, the paper examines how technological
intensification, pesticide dependence, and migrant labour regimes have produced both material exposures and epistemic erasures.

Building on insights from authors such as Nash and Jouzel, who argue that mobility and denial of harm are not accidental but constitutive of agro-industrial power relations, the analysis shows how risk has been systematically externalized onto the most vulnerable bodies while certainty has been constructed through stable, controllable datasets. Through a methodology that integrates oral history, archival research, and environmental and public health data, the paper compares official scientific narratives with lived knowledge circulating among farmers and migrant workers between the 1980s and the 2000s.
The research asks: How did different actors construct and negotiate discourses and practices of agricultural risk in the context of European agri-food modernization? And what does a critical comparison between oral testimonies and documentary sources reveal about the socio-political negotiation of pesticides risk?

Rather than offering definitive causal claims, this paper outlines a methodological and conceptual framework to bridge the gap between official scientific narratives and lived knowledge-highlighting how recognizing embodied knowledge, soil memory, and collective experience as legitimate forms of expertise may allow historians to reconsider the history of agricultural modernization and its ongoing ecological and social consequences.

Author

• Silvia Pérez-Criado, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science