Paul Sperneac-Wolfer

In light of unprecedented climate disturbances, this dissertation project explores how global 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. Preliminary research reveals that while agrofood-science/governmental actors develop technological solutions to heat stress, these interventions in the field of plant health contrast with the federal inertia that is contested by activists in the field of worker health. This study 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 of unevenly valuing the well-being of migrant greenhouse workers and plants. 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 centralizes three questions: Through which practices and technologies is soil in Eastern Austria 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?