Kregg Hetherington, PhD

Research interests

Dr. Kregg Hetherington is the Concordia University Research Chair in Environmental Ethnography. His research specializes in experimental ethnographic practices and the politics of environment, infrastructure and the bureaucratic state. His recent book, The Government of Beans (Duke 2020) won three awards, including the Rachel Carson Book Prize from the Society for the Social Study of Science.

Kregg's long-term ethnographic work in Paraguay chronicles how small farmers caught in a sweeping agrarian transition have experienced that country's halting transition to democracy, showing how activists create new ways of thinking and practising government, which has led to two books, Guerrilla Auditors and the Government of Beans.

Kregg is also director of the Concordia Ethnography Lab, where he runs a collaborative project called Montreal Waterways, which aims to understand Montreal’s changing relationship with water as a defining feature of its environment and infrastructure. Since 2022, the lab leads a larger matrix of similar collaborative initiatives around North America, aiming to promote experimental and collaborative methods in anthropology and adjacent disciplines. 

He supervises graduate students working ethnographically in a wide range of areas, including environment and infrastructure studies, Science and Technology Studies, Latin American agrarian politics, and the ethnography of bureaucracy.

Primary research and teaching foci

• Environment and Infrastructure
  
• Politics of scientific and expert knowledge and government regulation
• Social movements, international development and the state
• Corruption, transparency and bureaucracy
• Paraguayan and Latin American history and politics
• Agriculture and food politics
• Water Infrastructure
  

Courses

Selected publications

Books

2020The Government of Beans: Regulating Lifein the Age of Monocrops. Durham: Duke University Press.

2019Infrastructure, Environment and Life inthe Anthropocene (ed.). Durham: Duke University Press.

2011Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in neoliberal Paraguay.Durham: Duke University Press.

2005 Cultivating Utopia: Organic Farmersin a Conventional Landscape. Halifax: Fernwood Press.

Edited Journal Issues

2024“The Future of Facts in Latin America.” Thematic Cluster of Tapuya, Scienceand Technology in Latin America. Edited with Andrea Ballestero and EdenMedina. Volume 7, December.

2014“Nature, Culture and the State,” special dossier of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 19(2) editedwith Jeremy Campbell.

Articles and Book Chapters

2026 “After Land” book chapter for TheAnthropology of Land (eds. Andres León Araya and Priti Sampat). Inproduction with University of Colorado Press.

2025 “Entangled Territories,” in Southern Anthropocenes (ed. CasperBruun Jensen). London: Routledge.

2025 “Composite Ethnography: Collective encounters with emergent objects” Ethnography.Summer 2025.

2025 “The Time of Ghost Rivers” Environmental Humanities. November2025.

2024 “The Patent and the Freezer: puttingagrarian facts in their place.” Tapuya 7(1).

2022 “The Big Flush of Montreal: on theInfrastructural non-Event.” Authors Kregg Hetherington, Elie Jalbert. SocialStudies of Science.

2020 “Agribiopolitics:Plant and Human Health in the Age of Monocrops.” Environment and Planning D:Society and Space.

2019 "AMonopoly on Killing: Soy, Labour and the Long Green Revolution.” In How Nature Works, eds. Alex Blanchette and Sarah Besky. Pp.41-58. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press.

2019 “How doEnvironmental Harms Become Political?” In RoutledgeCompanion to Actor Network Theory, eds Celia Roberts, Ignacio Farras andAnders Blok. London: Routledge.

2019“Keywords for the Anthropocene.” In Infrastructure,Environment and Life in the Anthropocene. Ed. Kregg Hetherington. Durham: Duke University Press.

2018“Peasants, Experts, Clients, and Soybeans: The Fixing of Paraguay’s CivilService,” CurrentAnthropology (49: 18S)

2016 “Surveyingthe Future Perfect: Anthropology, Development and the Promise of Infrastructure,” in Infrastructuresand Social Complexity: A Routledge Companion. Eds. Penny Harvey, CasperBruun Jensen & Atsuro Morita. Pgs 40-50. London: Routledge.

2016 “La Soja Ante La Ley: Prácticas de Conocimiento,Responsabilidad y El Boom de La Soja En Paraguay.” Revista ParaguayDesde Las Ciencias Sociales (7):177–203.

2014“Nature, Infrastructure and the State: Rethinking development in Latin America”with Jeremy Campbell. Journal of LatinAmerican and Caribbean Anthropology 19(2).

2014“Waiting for the Surveyor: States, Development and the Temporality ofInfrastructure.” Journal of LatinAmerican and Caribbean Anthropology 19(2).

2014“Regular Soybeans: Translation and framing in the regulation of a mega-crop.” Indiana Journal ofGlobal Legal Studies, 21(1): 55-78.

2014 “La contra-reforma agraria en el Paraguay” in Capitalismo: terra e poder na America Latina(1982-2012). Vol.1, Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Paraguay y Uruguay.  Edited by Guillermo Almeyra, João MárcioMendes Pereira, Luciano Concheiro, Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves.  Buenos Aires: Peña Lillo Continente yCLACSO.

2013“Beans Before the Law: Knowledge Practices, Responsibility, and the Paraguayansoy boom.” Cultural Anthropology 28(1): 65-85.

2012 “Tierra malhabida y el engaño de lainstitucionalidad.” NovaPolis 5: 31-54.

2012“Agency, Scale and Information.” Politicaland Legal Anthropology Review, 35(2): 241-246.

2012“Promising Information: Democracy, Development and the Remapping of LatinAmerica.” Economy and Society 41(2): 127-150.

2009“The strategic incoherence of development: Marketing expertise in the WorldDevelopment Report.” Journal of Peasant Studies 36(3): 665-673.

2009“Privatizing the Private in Rural Paraguay: Precarious Lots and the Materialityof Rights.” American Ethnologist 36(2): 224-241.

2008“Populist Transparency: the Documentation of Reality in Rural Paraguay.” Journalof Legal Anthropology 1(1): 45-69.