No dia 4 de julho, Paul Sperneac-Wolfer (University of Barcelona) será o orador convidado do Seminário do Grupo de Investigação DIversidades: Etnografias no Mundo Contemporâneo.

Sobre o evento: In light of unprecedented climate disturbances, this dissertation project explores how designs of industrial food production are sustained in a time they engender heightened precarities for select groups of people. 40% of Austrian vegetables are produced in a greenhouse belt in East Austria, an area disproportionately affected by prolonged heat waves (APCC 2014). Preliminary research reveals that while agrofoodscience/governmental actors in the domain of plant health develop technological solutions to heat stress, this contrasts with what is criticized by activists and labor unions as the inertia of Austrian state regulation in the field of worker health. Against this background, this dissertation critically interrogates whether and how efforts to mitigate the environmental hazards of heatwaves in Austrian high-tech horticulture become the grounds for entrenched and new hierarchies and conflicts, paying particular attention to how greenhouse worker well-being is unevenly valued vis-a-vie the wellbeing of plants and the upkeep of harvest rates. By using ethnographic methods and drawing on anthropological contributions to the fields of agrarian capitalism, labor studies and the biopolitics of the environment, this project pursues three sub-questions:

Through which practices and technologies is soil in Eastern Austrian horticulture made productive? How is this productivity maintained by different groups of people and at what cost? And how are the effects of heat waves on workers and plants understood and responded to differently?

Paul Sperneac-Wolfer studied anthropology at the University of Vienna, the University College London (UCL) and Central European University (CEU). He currently pursues his doctorate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona and works as a PhD researcher in the ERC project FOODCIRCUITS. His research investigates questions of the industrialization of European agriculture, climate justice and labor migration. He examines these topics in a transnational setting that spans between Austria and Romania. Methodologically, he is interested in advancing and experimenting with collaborative, visual and engaged ethnographic approaches.

A partir das 11h, na Sala 2 do ICS-ULisboa e online.