Kata Beilin

Biography

"Kata Beilin is a writer and researcher. She is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a faculty affiliate at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies; the Center for Culture, History, and Environment; the Latin American, Iberian, and Caribbean Studies Program; and the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies. Specializing in environmental cultural studies in the Hispanic world, Kata promotes transdisciplinary and collaborative research across different fields, including nonacademic partners and knowledges. She is particularly interested in how alliances between humans, plants, and animals in rural cultures and in the cultures of the forests play out in the debates on land use and agro-technologies. Her current project, led in collaboration with Sai Suryanarayanan, seeks new understandings of acceptance and resistance to GE crops in Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, and other countries of the Hispanic world by developing novel concepts—interspecies alliance, interspecies resistance and interspecies re-existence—to attend to the intertwined dynamics between plants, insects, microbial communities, and human bodies in the debates over future agri-cultures. Her parallel solo book focuses on alternative economies and cultures of environmental renewal in Spain and Latin America that involve agro-ecology, feminist economies, and indigenous environmental ethics and philosophies."

Research Interest

Interspecies Resistance to Genetically Engineered Crops in Luso-Hispanic Agricultures