ABSTRACT
The chapters presented in this volume highlight the complexity of labour mobility behind the Europeanizing and globalizing agri-food networks that we encounter in our daily lives. Across the Global North, we see foodstuffs in our supermarkets and trucks on our motorways; but almost invariably fail to see the labour in our fields or in fields further away. As political and economic subjects of nation states and globalizing economies and as moral subjects of our communities, redressing our ignorance of the lives of those who make our food is perhaps even more pressing than questioning its origins. This volume helps to fill gaps in our knowledge of the temporalities and spatialities of the labour mobilities that make globalizing agrifood networks possible. This volume shows us how European seasonal migration is an assemblage of shifting fresh food supply chain dynamics, changing farming practices, regulatory interventions and complex labour and migration politics. The emergence of such assemblages involves complex politics of demography, economy and identity. Of course, such assemblages are both intentional and performative. Boeckler and Berndt (this volume) observe that labour takes on new shapes and forms as it moves, crosses borders and passes through certification and other ordering processes. Its co-constitutiveness with shifting agri-commodity economies and values, and its embeddedness in rights regimes and invisible codings highlight the complex and unstable actor network behind the apparently unproblematic flow of apparently stabilized goods between apparently fixed settings of fields, supermarkets and individual stomachs. Rather, as Mésini (this volume) points out with her notions of ‘posted labour’, the borders described by Boeckler and Berndt are not only shifting but worked on by economic actors who exploit fissures in regulatory space and differentiations in lived and imagined social spaces. Territory, then, does not look how it has in the past, and neither does the spatiality and temporality of 21st century life.
