STS and social movement scholars have shown the importance of 'getting undone science done' to advance the goals of social movements fighting environmental health injustice. The production and mobilization of counter-expertise, meaning the reliance on expertise, broadly construed, to contest regulatory decisions based on scientific knowledge, must be further analyzed by differentiating among types of expertise and strategies to mobilize them. In social mobilization against the unrestricted use of pesticides in Argentina, the affected community in Ituzaingó Anexo developed three types of expertise. The community first drew upon its own local knowledge of cases of illness and, as lay people, produced the first epidemiological map of this area. Then, they enrolled scientists and NGOs as allies to jointly learn about pesticide contamination as an explanation for illness. The enlisted scientists produced new knowledge by conducting environmental and epidemiological studies. Finally, sympathetic public health authorities, legal experts, and a district attorney designed a successful legal strategy to stop fumigations in that area and enforce local regulations. The case confirms the importance of producing undone science, and shows that its effectiveness can be explained by intertwined strategies deployed by a triad of lay/local, scientific, and legal experts to overcome the expertise barrier.

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The introduction of biotechnology is part of a global process of structural change in agriculture characterized by an increased integration of world agriculture with high corporate control. However, as the legal competence to allow the planting and trade of genetically modified (GM) crops commonly lies at the level of the nation state, this remains strategic in the politics of GM crops, both for actors promoting the technology and for social movements struggling against it. This paper illustrates this argument with an analysis of the struggles over GM crops in Brazil. It shows how the implementation of a food regime based on biotechnology, corporate control and neoliberal globalism depended on the state and was a contested process.

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What does the diversity of social movements and food initiatives tell us about processes of social change? I argue that they offer a productive analytical lens to observe social change because they identify injustices and dynamics of inequalities in the food system and are actively engaged in transforming these. Alternative local food initiatives react to the environmental impacts of globalized food relations; food sovereignty movements highlight class inequalities and power asymmetries in the food system that affect people’s rights to culturally appropriate foodways; food justice movements denounce institutional racism; feminist movements fight persistent gender inequalities from food production to consumption; vegan movements defend animal rights. These are often mapped onto different world regions, with food justice movements more present in the US; food sovereignty movements louder in the Global South; feminist food movements more active in Latin America; and local food movements commonly in the Global North. This article brings together diverse strands of activism and research on social inequalities related to food under the conceptual umbrella of food inequalities. In addition to concept building, it contributes to a sociology of food studies by mapping the geopolitics of knowledge about social change behind the growing mobilization around food issues.