Locke in the Berry Forest : The Swedish Commercial Berry Industry as a Site of a Plantationocene

Sammanfattning

The Swedish commercial berry industry hinges upon precarious migrant experiences and wider global histories that remain underemphasized. While the Right of Public Access shapes the industry, this socio-legal institution – informed by Lockean property rights thinking – is rarely traced in sector research. Seeking to situate the Swedish commercial berry industry in a wider historical and societal context, this inquiry investigates the ways in which it operates as a site of a Plantationocene. For this qualitative endeavor, fieldnotes, interviews, and policy papers complemented by news media material, are studied interdisciplinary, using ethnographic fieldwork, oral history, and critical discourse analysis. The findings suggest that operationalizations of the Right of Public Access in the berry industry discursively reproduce Lockean notions. This study also identifies that the rationale of exploiting precarious labor and the sustaining of opacity within the industry enact through mechanisms that construct mobility as apparent choice, control labor and voice options along racialized lines, and organize work in extractive ways. Taken together, historical notions underpin the alienation in which berries and laborers are violently merged. In justifying the hegemonic claim that Swedish berries constitute a significant yet underutilized resource, which resonates with John Locke’s notion of improvement in that they promise immense potential if subjected to further commerce, the task of berry picking is placed on essentialized foreign labor. Despite the racialization of bodily strain, this thesis also foregrounds the myriad ways in which these arrangements are resisted. In doing so, it addresses thematic gaps in research on the berry industry while also showing the heterogeneity of precarious labor.