Temporariness made interminable
Pacific Islander farmworkers in Australia and the enduring crises of global agricultural production
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19004814 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stead (0000-0002-0014-3189, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation Deakin University Burwood VIC Australia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 579-589 |
| Publication date | 2022-11-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Agrarian Change (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1471-0358 • E-ISSN: 1471-0366 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/joac.12524 |
| OpenAlex | W4311058447 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
| References cited | 22 |
Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork with Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) workers in south‐east Australia, I reflect in this paper on the experience of interminable temporariness and on its implications for the structural conditions underpinning contemporary horticultural labour in Australia. Although in many ways reflective of the specificities of a unique historical moment, the interminable temporariness experienced through the COVID‐19 pandemic also speaks to broader, enduring conditions produced within contemporary Australian agriculture. Here, the restructuring of the agri‐industry produces for many what Lauren Berlant describes as the “impasse” or “crisis ordinariness” of life under neoliberalism. At the same time, logics of development—including racialized imaginaries and border regimes—articulate with agricultural guest worker schemes in ways that seek to fix whole populations and regions in relations of suspended hope. In this context, I argue, the pandemic exposed and intensified structural vulnerabilities and unequal distributions of risk, which are encoded in the political economy of farm work in Australia, while also cleaving open new, if tentative, possibilities for agency and solidarity
Agriculture · Archaeology · Capitalism · Economics · Economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Restructuring · Social science · Sociology · Solidarity · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact · History · Law · Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development
Rural dreams and constrained cosmopolitanism
“You’re Just Stuck in a Hole, Really”
Migrant farmworkers
From tourists to essential workers
Guestworker Schemes in Pacific Island Countries
Fale Pili
Re-mobilizing immobilized labor
Lost in space (and time)
Architectures of un/belonging
Precarious labour geographies of working holiday makers
A great many of them die
Cruel Optimism
The White Possessive
The White Possessive
Cruel Optimism
Amplifying invisibility
‘There will be no law, or people to protect us’
Essential agriculture, sacrificial labor, and the Covid‐19 pandemic in the US South
Unfree Labour and Australia’s Obscured Pacific Histories
We don’t feel free at all”
Making place in a place that doesn't recognise you
Contesting rural Australia in the time of accelerating climate change
The ideology of temporary labour migration in the post-global era
Temporary Migration, Transnational Politics? The Politics of Temporary Migration in Australia
Beyond the 'Triple Win
Masters and Servants
Encountering Development
Precarity's reach
| Unique citing works | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3,67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 11 |