‘Like yelling bomb in an airport’: bed bugs and more-than-human geographies of migrant farm worker hostels

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Barry, K
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2023
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This paper unravels the intimate and irritant more-than-human encounters in hostel accommodation used by migrant farm workers in regional Australia. These are communal places of inhabitancy that draw attention to the intersecting concerns of highly mobile populations, seasonal labour, migration politics, and the socio-material relationships that flourish within such spaces. I examine the presence of bed bugs and other nonhumans through interviews with farm workers, hostel operators and managers, and ethnographic observations, to highlight broader implications of such ‘communal’ forms of living. The communal nature of living alongside others is challenging, especially when the arrangement is for work and migration, rather than leisure, and due to a lack of affordable housing options. The paper uses a more-than-human lens to bring into dialogue the mobilities of these workers with notions of communal living, which are intrinsically tied to visa conditions and labour migration. In doing so, the paper contributes to broadening the understandings of how and where mobilities take shape, and the impacts that more-than-human agencies have on day-to-day life in communal living situations.

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Social & Cultural Geography

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DE220100394

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© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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This publication has been entered in Griffith Research Online as an advanced online version.

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Political economy and social change

Gender studies

Human geography

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Barry, K, ‘Like yelling bomb in an airport’: bed bugs and more-than-human geographies of migrant farm worker hostels, Social & Cultural Geography, 2023

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