Controversies over transgenic biotechnologies in southern Brazil

This book, the result of a Master's research project within the Graduate Program in Sociology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, portrays the controversies surrounding transgenic organisms from an innovative viewpoint of Science and Technology Studies. This is the operationalization of a pragmatics of the event. The history of transgenics is recovered and retold with new data. The ways in which the discovery, entry and permanence of transgenics in the world and, more specifically, in southern Brazil, update scientific, agronomic, legal and political practices around the themes of productivity in the field, the environment, health and techno-scientific knowledge are highlighted. Through a cartography of associations, the pragmatic operations of articulation, organization, mobilization and expansion confuse the context and content of the sciences and, as a result, the definitions of a transgenic are transformed along with the surprise of the action and the identities of the agents and groups involved in the controversies. We hope to problematize the ontological division between society and nature and provide new clues about the intertwining of science and politics in Brazil.