Unfree labour and refugee workers in Middle Eastern agriculture I Panel I December 2021

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01 December 2021 This lecture revisits the notion of “unfree labour” through the study of refugee workers in Middle Eastern agriculture. It presents findings from the Refugee Labour under Lockdown project, drawing on interviews with 80 Syrian agricultural workers, 20 intermediaries, and 20 employers in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The International Labour Organisation’s definition of “forced labour” does not capture Syrians’ experience of “unfreedom” - born out of the interplay of neoliberal businesses, with their need for cheap, mobile labour, and restrictive asylum policies in Middle Eastern host countries - which produce these workers. Through an anthropological lens, we see that refugees are recruited into global supply chains through kinship networks. This lecture will be given by Ann-Christin Zuntz (University of Edinburgh) followed by discussion with Neil Howard (University of Bath) who will contribute a comparative perspective on the role of refugee and migrant labour in increasingly globalised agricultural production. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ About the speakers: Dr Ann-Christin Zuntz is a lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. She is an economic anthropologist, with a focus on the intersections of labour and forced migrations, and gender, in the Mediterranean. Since 2015, Ann has conducted fieldwork with displaced Syrians in Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia, and Bulgaria, and, remotely, in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. She does collaborative research with Syrian academics within the One Health FIELD Network. Ann is currently a visiting fellow at the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) in Tunis, researching displacement trajectories and social networks of Syrian refugees in North Africa. Dr Neil Howard is Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath. His research focuses on the governance of exploitative and so-called 'unfree' labour and in particular the various forms of it targeted for eradication by the Sustainable Development Goals. He conducts ethnographic and participatory action research with people defined as victims of trafficking, slavery, child labour and forced labour, and political anthropological research on the institutions that seek to protect them. He currently leads an ERC Starting Grant that aims to trial both action research and unconditional cash transfers as potential policy responses to indecent or exploitative work in Hyderabad, India. Neil founded and is one of the editors of the Beyond Trafficking and Slavery section at openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery), which aims to put radical and grassroots commentary on ‘unfree’ or exploitative work and movement into the public domain.