(Ol)Factory Town: Sensing Multispecies Necropolitics in the Chattanooga Chicken Industry

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 1: Environmental Hazards, Rural Labor, and Ecological Inequality

Abstract

Industrial animal agriculture raises critical questions regarding the sustainability of our global food system, the (re)organization of rural and urban communities, transportation, consumption, and waste. This study is an ethnographic investigation of the “chicken houses” in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This study seeks to expand the possibilities of more-than-human labor struggle, sociology of the environment, embodiment, sensory pollution, and how odor shapes and influences how people build, live, and cultivate community. This study treats poultry plants as sites where life, death, and breath are administered through mechanisms of bodily labor, disembodiment, transformation, and control. I engage a mixed-method and sensory ethnography – worker and resident “odor diaries” and geospatial mapping of smell zones, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with employees and members of the plant labor union (embodied labor, sensory and lived experience); residents and local business owners (odor’s disruption of or forced acceptance into daily life); city officials and healthcare professionals (zoning, ghost towns to gentrification, deindustrialization, decision-making, governance, and environmental health). I am interested in the sensory and environmental violence of Chattanooga’s poultry industry—odors, noise, pollution, and bodily disintegration—and how this reveals troubling hierarchies of power between humans, animals, and ecosystems. This study maps how industrial odor acts as a necropolitical tool, marking racialized labor zones and disposable life.

Author

• Natalie Blanton, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga