Friends, colleagues, please join us for the July instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2018, presented by Dr Victoria Stead, of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

 

Date: Thursday 5 July
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

(Also, by videoconference, at Deakin Burwood F2.009, Deakin Downtown, and VMP ARTSED SHSS 39354)

 

Mobility under constraint: Precarity, temporality, and colonial legacies in the Shepparton food bowl
 
Labour in the Australian horticultural industry is being reconfigured in the midst of a complex of social, environmental and economic transformations. This paper examines the experiences a group of ni-Vanuatu workers who arrived in the Greater Shepparton Region as part of a specific visa program that brings Pacific Islanders to work to work in designated jobs—particularly, harvest labour—for which there is deemed to be an insufficient local labour supply. The temporary migrations of these workers, the highly mediated labour relations they are embroiled in, and the conditions of the industry within which they are employed, resonate with key aspects of the neoliberal transformations captured by the burgeoning literature on precarity. Precarity reduces the ‘lifelong scope’ of the worker to a series of exploitable, present moments, and to this extent also acts upon the future (Tsianos and Papadopoulos 2006). In this vein, the ni-Vanuatu workers are thrust into relations and rhythms of labour that both promise, and work to subvert, their flourishing. But their experiences also encourage a reconsideration of the presentism that is often ascribed to precarity. Precarity may, indeed, describe a particular moment of contemporary capitalism, but in the packing sheds and tomato farms of the north-central Victoria, it also has a genealogy that connects the migrations of 21st century ni-Vanuatu with those of their 19th century kin ‘blackbirded’ to the sugar fields of Queensland and northern New South Wales. The labour relations and experiences of contemporary ni-Vanuatu are thus not only precarious but also starkly, and hierarchically, racialized. Here, the denial of full humanity under contemporary regimes of flexible accumulation – the ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant 2011) of precarity – echoes the civilising projects & developmentalism that have long been the marker of Australian coloniality in the Pacific.

 

Biography

Victoria Stead is a DECRA Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. She is an anthropologist with a focus on the Pacific, particularly Melanesia, and also regional Australia. Her research explores local negotiations of postcolonial legacies, and processes of change related to land, labour, memory, and belonging. Victoria is the author of Becoming Landowners: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), and a co-author of Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Livelihoods: Other Paths for Papua New Guinea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012).