CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Bret-Day, Frederick David Lawrence |
|---|---|
| Title | Working Lives: More-than-human use-relations on a UK organic dairy farm |
| Summary | In spite of hardships, and encroaching systems of intensive capital-oriented farming, many livestock rearers in the Northwest of England choose to produce organically. When maximal productivity isn’t at the forefront of decision-making, it opens up cosmological questions of how and why they choose to farm this way, and poses ambiguities regarding how species relate to one another in a context that still demands the instrumentalisation of life. Research took place over a month spent living and working on an organic dairy farm. In this space of mitigated discipline, where long-standing use-relations have rendered cattle dependent on the sovereignty of human dominion, organic production gives rise to a number of co-dependencies that see power and control reoriented through modalities of care. What emerges is a site where conscious acts of ‘working with’ subvert the most acute modes of extraction and objectification, and aid the formation of a common, coeval world. Care, intimacy, conviviality, all of these exist within the organic ideology as a way of resisting capitalism, and yet they are also the means through which extraction operates. Incorporation into nonhuman social orders, affective communication, the nurturing of idiosyncratic selves into ‘good workers’; these are all formed from, and conducive to kinship, but they are also vital in-roads to cooperation and commercial output. What at first appears as tension, between companionship and instrumentality, largely coheres both practically and cosmologically. It’s a mode of production that positions itself in radical defiance to capitalism, striving to function beyond its homogenising reach, but ultimately finds itself rendered as a peri-capitalist entity succumbing to the edicts of the free market. |
| Supervisor | Rajaram, Prem Kumar; Monterescu, Daniel |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/bret-day_frederick.pdf |
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