Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates the liminal spaces in between small town and rural life in the UK. It aims to untangle the ways in which the deterritorialising effects of global capital operate through the precarious livelihoods of both migrant and domestic workers and the formation of subjectivities.

Paper long abstract:

Economic power can be understood as the expression of an asymmetry of forces, providing the power to prescribe and impose modes of future domination through the construction of new subjectivities and affects. Studies of global cities have historically been central to the experiential analysis of poverty; however, rural areas experience specific deprivation and precarity which are often obscured through spatial and contextual idiosyncrasies. In view of this, relatively little is known about how inequalities contribute to the creation of semi-rural spaces in the UK and how specific subjectivities both form these processes and emerge as part of them. Changing forms of exploitation under late capitalism demand the emergence of new kinds of subjectivity in rural areas. This is, in part, due to the embodied demands of labour regimes and global capital in areas where industry hinges on territorialised and temporal processes as is the case in agriculture and food production. Findings will be introduced from a pilot study carried out between July and September 2017 with factory and agricultural workers in the area around The Wash. The research will use ethnographic and participatory arts techniques to interrogate the ways that wider systems of power interact with specific subjectivities in rural areas in order to make a call for new understandings of how subjectivity is both foundational to and formed by rural space

E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed