Short abstract:

We investigate the emergence of pesticides effects research in Argentina (1990-2023). Using a novel domain-topic model approach, we describe the thematic and relational structure of pesticide research and identify the network of expert activists central to the field’s emergence.

Long abstract:

This paper investigates the relationship between two emergent fields caught up in a long-term epistemic and social struggle, indicative of the politics of expert knowledge in times of transition. Part of a larger, ethnographic and interview-based study of experts and expert networks in Argentina’s pesticide conflict, this paper investigates two processes that unfolded simultaneously during 2000-2020: the development of the anti-spraying social movement and the emergence of a new national scientific field of pesticide effects research. To understand how the political activism of experts has shaped the scope and direction of Argentine pesticide research, we employ novel domain-topic models to analyze a bibliographic corpus of scientific publications of Argentine researchers collected from the Web of Science Core Collection (1990-2023). We describe the thematic and relational structure of Argentine pesticide research and, subsequently, locate those thematic domains aligned with the political interests of the anti-spraying movement. We show that 1) at a granularity level where the field splits into 13 thematic domains, expert activists have published in nearly all of them, 2) expert activists have published pioneering research in approximately 5 of those domains, and that 3) expert activists’ research, both preceding and following their activism, has been particularly influential in large domains of interest to the anti-spraying movement. Our broader aim is to advance network based, symmetrical analysis of the dynamics and impacts of expert activism.