Funded by the NSF Program in Cultural Anthropology

2021-2024

In collaboration with Elizabeth Cullen Dunn (Indiana University Bloomington) and Seth Holmes (UC Berkeley), this ongoing project studies refugees’ paradoxical positioning as “essential” and “prohibited” workers in the American agricultural system. The project compares the reorganization of food industry labor from the perspective of Burmese meatpacking workers, migrant farm workers, and grocery store workers. In so doing, we examine how new flows of capital depend on the creation of racialized bodies and labor markets based on citizenship status.