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  4. "Ain't No Life for a Mother!": Racial Capitalism and the Making of Poultry Processing Workers in Northeast Georgia

"Ain't No Life for a Mother!": Racial Capitalism and the Making of Poultry Processing Workers in Northeast Georgia

File(s)
Freshour_cornellgrad_0058F_11108.pdf (19.64 MB)
Permanent Link(s)
https://doi.org/10.7298/X4V1231T
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/59783
Collections
Cornell Theses and Dissertations
Author
Freshour, Carrie Rebecca
Abstract

This dissertation exposes racial capitalism through an on-the-ground study of poultry processing work in the American South. It is an ethnography of the South’s largest agricultural industry, of the production and consumption of cheap food through a cheapening of labor, but fundamentally, of people, places, and daily life. It is also a reflection or mirror on what we, as a society, have become, one that quite literally disregards, dismembers, and disables life for the comfort and wealth of a very few. Finally, it is a critique of the world as it stands from the perspective of workers moving in and out of "the poultry," and an exploration of how change might emerge from this way of seeing, "from way, way below." To understand poultry work and workers, we must understand how workers are made and re-made, but also how they shape production and consumption, as well as the broader communities in which they live, work, eat, move, celebrate, and resist.

Date Issued
2018-08-30
Keywords
immigration
•
Labor
•
Labor relations
•
poultry
•
Racial Capitalism
•
US South
•
Social Reproduction
•
Sociology
•
Geography
Committee Chair
McMichael, Philip David
Committee Member
Wolford, Wendy W.
Friedman, Elias David
Heynen, Nik
Degree Discipline
Development Sociology
Degree Name
Ph. D., Development Sociology
Degree Level
Doctor of Philosophy
Type
dissertation or thesis

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