Infrastructuring Arrival and Beyond: An infrastructural ethnography of agricultural labour migration in Westland and Haspengouw

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Central and Eastern European migrant workers become entangled in, navigate, and actively shape the agricultural regions of Westland (NL) and Haspengouw (BE) upon arrival. Drawing on the infrastructural turn within anthropology, geography, and migration studies, I explore these contexts through socio-material arrival infrastructures, which both constitute and are constituted by the regime of migrant labour in agriculture. Adopting a material-semiotic perspective, I approach both industrial agriculture and arrival infrastructures not as fixed structures but as fragmented, relational configurations assembled through everyday practices. Through an infrastructural ethnography in these two agro-industrial regions, I explore how migrant workers encounter, inhabit, and transform these infrastructures as they negotiate not only work and housing but also broader conditions of arrival. The ethnography combines long-term fieldwork, seventy qualitative interviews, and co-creative methods such as the exhibition Picking Fruit, Sowing Stories. It follows how workers navigate recruitment systems, housing, mobility, and everyday life across borders. Situating the context of labour migration in Westland and Haspengouw within the literature on the agriculture–migration nexus and intra-EU labour mobility, the dissertation outlines the historical processes of agricultural intensification and deregulation that have produced landscapes of monoculture and dependence on racialised, hyper-flexible labour. Within this context, arrival infrastructures - from recruitment offices and seasonal contracts to migrant hotels and local housing policies - organise who can live, move, and work, and under what conditions. These infrastructures sustain productivity while constraining workers’ social and spatial mobility, producing conditions of permanent temporariness and hypermobile stuckness. Yet this infrastructural approach moves beyond a focus on working and housing conditions to highlight the practices of care, repair, and social reproduction that lie within them, through which migrants begin to rework their arrival and build meaning in precarious contexts. Focusing on everyday mobilities, the dissertation also develops a viapolitical perspective that reveals how movement itself becomes a site of control and endurance. Commuting, waiting, and shared travel practices expose the entanglement of regulation and resilience within the regime of agricultural labour. Similarly, the analysis of minor integrations highlights how migrants establish fragile but meaningful relations at superdiverse worksites that function as contact zones, where belonging is negotiated beyond formal integration frameworks. The dissertation argues that these everyday acts of care, endurance, and creative collaboration represent forms of infrastructuring from below, offering a different perspective on how migrant subjectivity within the agriculture–migration nexus is understood. Moreover, this infrastructuring from below challenges dominant temporalities associated with labour migration and the notion of the ‘temporary worker’. It reveals instead alternative temporalities in which migrants sustain livelihoods, delay return, and craft temporary anchors. Methodologically, by engaging co-creatively with rituals, routines, and shared agricultural practices, the dissertation contributes to imagining arrival infrastructures that are more caring than controlling. More fundamentally, it calls for greater attentiveness to the aspirations and situated knowledges of those whose labour sustains Europe’s agro-industrial futures, and to reflect on whose labour we value and how that value is shown and organised.