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‘Keeping Them Down’

Chlorpyrifos, the most widely used insecticide in the US, has gained great notoriety as a contested chemical substance after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency refused to ban it in 2017. Arguing that scientific studies support their observations and suspicions that agricultural pesticides subtly produce neurological and cognitive harm, concerned groups continue to demand US regulatory agencies to ban this chemical. Their narratives demonstrate how the maintenance of unequal racial and capitalist orders across generational time is tied to small chemical exposures permitted by state regulatory agencies during critical temporalities in the life course. This essay shows the importance of including local perspectives in research that seeks to understand how concerns for the mass neurological and cognitive disabling emerge from lived experiences entangled in histories of racism, exploitation, and neglect. Interweaving feminist science and technology studies, queer theory, and critical disability studies, this analysis contributes to the limited scholarship on cognitive disabling in contexts of environmental injustice through exposure to industrially produced chemicals.