Eleventh Global Studies Conference

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 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.