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Project

Sabbatical Karel Arnaut: Cultures of externalisation: daily practices and changing normativities of what is ‘beyond’

Externalisation is rapidly becoming recognized as the pivotal issue at the heart of the most important concerns of our times: (a) climate change/the anthropocene, (b) inclusion/diversity, and (c) migration/globalised labour. Externalisation consists in relegating vital functions of your lifeworld to zones considered outside of it, marginal or less valuable. Among those vital functions the regeneration of natural resources (mineral, living or processed goods) and of human resources (reproduction & care, labour force) are key and subject to different forms of extraction and exploitation beyond physical (nation-state or regional) borders, or along a multitude of lines of in/exclusion of gender, race, class, cultural or linguistic capital, etc. In line with the call to ‘pluralize the anthropocene”, I wish to pluralize externalisation in general and ethnographically explore (local) cultures of externalisation in a range of sites. By ‘cultures’ I mean conditions of concrete social life, assembling people, places and activities, words and norms, objects and affects – assemblages in which subjects construe, presume or reflect upon borders between what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’. The six research sites are situated in Belgium and Northern France, half of them can be expected to be more concerned with externalisation and half of them less so. The former ‘category’ regroups three sites situated in the food supply chain: an organic farm (De Groentelaar, Pepingen), a distribution centre of local/organic produce (Artisans & Paysans, Floreffe), and a cooperative local/organic supermarket (BeesCoop, Schaarbeek). The three allegedly less externalisationconscious sites feature people on the move: seasonal workers in an agro-industrial farm (SintTruiden), established migrants in a DIY supermarket (Gent) and a refugee transit camp (Dunkerque). One month ethnographic fieldwork per site will (a) provide me with preliminary data and (b) allow me to formulate and test a range of methods and concepts to research local ‘cultures of externalisation’ more thoroughly in other locales.

Date:1 Feb 2023 →  31 Jul 2023
Keywords:Externalisation, migration, climate change, diversity, culture-making
Disciplines:Ethnicity and migration studies, Social change, Environmental sociology