Images of work, images of defiance: engaging migrant farm worker voice through community-based arts

Abstract

This article addresses a stated need within the food justice movement scholarship to increase the attention paid to the political socialization of hired farm hands in industrial agriculture. In Canada, tackling the problem of farm worker equity has particular social and political contours related to the Canadian horticultural industry’s reliance on a state-managed migrant agricultural labour program designed to fill the sector’s labour market demands. As Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) produces relations of ‘unfree labour’, engaging migrant farm workers in social movement initiatives can be particularly challenging. Critical educational interventions designed to encourage migrant farm workers’ contribution to contemporary social movements in Canada must therefore confront the socio-cultural obstacles that constrict migrant farm workers’ opportunities to participate as full members of their communities. In this article, I argue that social justice oriented approaches to community-based arts can provide a means for increasing the social movement contributions of farm workers employed through managed labour migration schema such as Canada’s SAWP.

Full text

Vol.:(0123456789)
1 3
Agriculture and Human Values
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-018-9861-9
SYMPOSIUM/SPECIAL ISSUE
Images ofwork, images ofdefiance: engaging migrant farm worker
voice throughcommunity-based arts
J.AdamPerry1
Accepted: 23 March 2018
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract
This article addresses a stated need within the food justice movement scholarship to increase the attention paid to the politi-
cal socialization of hired farm hands in industrial agriculture. In Canada, tackling the problem of farm worker equity has
particular social and political contours related to the Canadian horticultural industry’s reliance on a state-managed migrant
agricultural labour program designed to fill the sector’s labour market demands. As Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker
Program (SAWP) produces relations of ‘unfree labour’, engaging migrant farm workers in social movement initiatives can
be particularly challenging. Critical educational interventions designed to encourage migrant farm workers’ contribution to
contemporary social movements in Canada must therefore confront the socio-cultural obstacles that constrict migrant farm
workers’ opportunities to participate as full members of their communities. In this article, I argue that social justice oriented
approaches to community-based arts can provide a means for increasing the social movement contributions of farm workers
employed through managed labour migration schema such as Canada’s SAWP.
Keywords Migrant farm workers· Theatre of the Oppressed· Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program· Guest worker
programs· Unfree labour· Canada
Abbreviation
SAWP Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program
Introduction
Community-based cultural production can be a powerful
tool for the political socialization of hired farm workers in
industrial agriculture. With a focus on Canada’s Seasonal
Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), a bi-lateral guest
worker regime between Canada, Mexico, and several Carib-
bean countries, in this article I assess the grassroots organi-
zational potential of directly engaging migrant farm workers
in an artistic and collective exploration of their daily lives.
In response to a growing literature that laments the lack
of attention paid to farm worker equity in the food justice
movement, in this article I argue that social justice oriented
approaches to community-based arts can provide a way to
increase the social movement contributions of farm work-
ers employed through managed migration schema such as
Canada’s SAWP. I develop this argument from an analysis
of participant observation extracted from a community-
arts project that I conducted with a small group of SAWP
workers in the Southwestern Ontario town of Leamington,
a major hub of Canada’s horticultural greenhouse industry.
This project was grounded in the practice of Theatre of the
Oppressed, a well-known arts-based adult education tool
designed by the late Brazilian educator and theatre direc-
tor Augusto Boal for engaging non-actors from traditionally
marginalized communities as a means of supporting social
and political change. While it has been established in the
extant literature that engaging SAWP workers in migrant and
food justice activism can be an excessively difficult task, it is
becoming more widely recognized by food justice activists
and scholars that doing so is imperative to developing an
inclusive and equitable movement.
While critical artistic interventions have not been widely
employed in the Canadian context, these have enjoyed broad
popularity in social movement activities with food work-
ers elsewhere, such as in the USA and Brazil. In order to
apply these cultural experiments to the Canadian setting, in
this article I engage with the conceptual understanding of
* J. Adam Perry
contact@adamperry.ca
1 School ofSocial Work/School oftheArts, McMaster
University, Togo Salmon Hall 410, 1280 Main Street West,
Hamilton, ONL8S4M4, Canada

J.A.Perry
1 3
the SAWP as a guest-worker regime sustained by the incor-
poration of a state-sanctioned system of ‘unfree labour’.
Borrowing from the work of feminist philosopher Nancy
Fraser, I further argue that the material injustices of unfree
labour policies and the cultural narratives that support them
profoundly restrict the communicative capacities of SAWP
workers, greatly reducing these workers’ ability to partici-
pate directly in food justice organizing. As a way of address-
ing the political and cultural ‘misrecognition’ of Canada’s
SAWP workers, critical adult educators and food justice
advocates should consider alternative, and in particular artis-
tic approaches to grassroots organizing as a way to more
effectively incorporate the voices of migrant farm workers
in social movement.
The article begins with an examination of farm worker
agency in the context of Canada’s SAWP. As an entry point,
I begin with recent discussions within the food sovereignty
scholarship that speak to the need for movement activists
and scholars to address the social justice concerns of food
labourers. Next, I discuss how the underlying logic of unfree
labour relations permeates workers’ experiences of daily life
in Canada’s SAWP. In the following section I examine how
the notion of ‘parity of participation’, a conception of justice
developed by feminist critical theorist Nancy Fraser, can
help to formulate an approach to organizing SAWP work-
ers that recognizes the need to foster not only the material,
but also the cultural resources required to nurture workers’
contribution to the food justice movement. I follow this sec-
tion with an in-depth exploration of the context and results
of a theatre-based adult education intervention with a group
of SAWP workers employed in Canada’s hydroponic green-
house industry. The article ends with a brief discussion of
how arts-based interventions such as the one I describe here
can provide an ethical and effective means for workers to
contribute to public conversations concerning migrant and
food justice.
Farm worker agency inCanada andthelogic
ofunfreedom
In the past decade there has been a growing interest among
food justice scholars regarding a perceived disconnect
between the food sovereignty movement and social justice
concerns related to the exploitation of food labourers (Allen
2008). With notable exceptions (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010;
Gray 2014) it is widely recognized that food movement
scholarship has not been actively engaged with challenges
facing food workers, particularly those who work in agri-
culture (Levkoe etal. 2016; Minkoff-Zern 2014; Sachs etal.
2014). While recent scholarship has examined the dynam-
ics of unpaid labour on organic farms (Levkoe 2017; Ekers
etal. 2016), a wider concern regarding the exploitation of
paid farm employees in the context of industrial agriculture
remains uncharted (Sachs etal. 2014). This discrepancy has
been expressed most succinctly by Minkoff-Zern (2014,
p.86), who claims that “despite the popular attention given
to food’s provenance, the actual workers who pick and pack
our food are consistently overlooked.” Similarly, Weiler and
colleagues (Weiler etal. 2016) address this tension within
the food movement in the Canadian context. Like scholars
elsewhere, they claim that hired farm workers are absent
from discussions of how to create sustainable food systems.
They state that “supporters of these movements have been
disengaged, in conflict with, or unsupportive of farmworker
equity” (Weiler etal. 2016, p.2). These various scholars
point out how farmworker agency in particular has been
either sidelined or not considered, bringing into sharp relief
the question, raised by Feagan (2007, p.29) of “who is in
and who is out” when considering the idea of ‘local’ in food
movement activism and knowledge production.
By sidelining the importance of farm worker agency,
those involved in the food justice movement are missing
an opportunity to understand how workers’ interests could
potentially shape the negotiation of production politics in
agriculture. Concerned scholars call on food researchers to
engage in forms of public sociology that support a move-
ment toward social justice for food workers. Allen (2008,
p.160), for example suggests that investigators design “par-
ticipatory, problem-solving research” that engages real peo-
ple in their real lives. Similarly Kohl-Arenas etal. (2014,
p.20) make the claim that the enduring inequalities embed-
ded in agricultural work can only be addressed once “the
voices and actions of those directly affected are included
in the process of designing solutions to the problems they
experience.” That notwithstanding, for those scholars who
have addressed this shortcoming, there is agreement that
while it may be imperative to do so, creating spaces for farm
workers to participate in political dialogue is “tremendously
difficult” (Weiler etal. 2016, p.12).
The difficulty that Weiler etal. (2016) observe is associ-
ated with engaging farm workers in the wider food justice
movement has contours that are particular to Canada. While
recent scholarship is beginning to connect the struggles of
farm workers in Canada to the sustainable food movement
(Hjalmarson etal. 2015; Weiler etal. 2016) the issue of
agricultural labour in this context has been most widely dis-
cussed in the area of migration and labour studies (Basok
2002; Preibisch 2010; Satzewich 1991). The primary focus
of this work has been related to social, political, and eco-
nomic examinations of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural
Worker Program (SAWP), a bilateral state-managed ‘guest
worker’ agreement between Canada, Mexico, and several
Caribbean countries. A useful conceptual tool that has been
employed in the service of interpreting the role that this
state managed labour migration schema plays in Canada’s

Images ofwork, images ofdefiance: engaging migrant farm worker voice throughcommunity-based…
1 3
horticultural industry is the notion of ‘unfree labour’ (Cho-
udry and Smith 2016b; Sharma 2012; Thomas 2016). The
condition of ‘unfree labour’ associated with the employ-
ment of migrant farm workers in Canada refers to the use of
“extraeconomic compulsion… to exact labour power” (Cho-
udry and Smith 2016a, p.8) from workers, primarily through
a restrictive migratory status (Perry 2012b; Satzewich 1991;
Sharma 2006).
As a central mechanism of labour control and coercion,
migrant farm workers’ citizenship restrictions in Canada
facilitate various techniques that constrict labour freedoms
for workers in both the realms of circulation and production
(Lebaron 2015; Preibisch 2010). These include: employer-
specific work permits that limit workers’ labour mobility;
the requirement that workers reside on employer property;
the non-authorization of family unification; the requirement
that workers return to their home countries at the end of their
contracts; and wide-scale restrictions on social and politi-
cal rights that constrain workers’ access to social programs
such as employment insurance and English as a Second
Language instruction (Basok 2002; Nakache and Kinoshita
2010; Ramsaroop 2016). These policies produce an everyday
home/workplace environment in which disciplinary employ-
ment practices may thrive, not the least of which are the
constant threat of deportation and potential removal from
the program as reprisal for resistant or defiant behaviours,
including engaging in political activism (Basok etal. 2014;
Vosko 2016). While these conditions severely limit the
political options available to workers, it is well documented
how this state mediated production of unfree labour relations
and the incorporation of a trans-migrant labour force have
benefited capitalist accumulation in Canadian agriculture
since the SAWP’s inception in 1966 (Preibisch 2010, 2012).
As such, by fashioning workers into “disposable commodi-
ties” (De Genova 2005, p.8) the policies and practices of
unfreedom are crucial to production relations in Canada’s
agri-food sector, making workers’ public participation par-
ticularly challenging.
Scholars have generally incorporated a political economy
approach to examining the production and reproduction of
a system of ‘unfree labour’ in Canada’s horticultural indus-
try. Preibisch (2010) for example places an examination
of unfree labour in agriculture within a wider context of
a liberalized global food economy. She examines how the
making of ‘unfreedom’ is a crucial means by which agri-
cultural businesses can exact greater control over their
workers in ways that benefit production. Still other scholars
have examined how territorial borders play a key role in
“securing and reproducing low wage and ‘unfree’ labour”
(Thomas 2016, p.24). In this vein, Sharma (2012) exam-
ines how nationalist discourses justify the subordination of
migrant workers through differential forms of incorpora-
tion, thereby containing workers as political subjects while
they are simultaneously integrated into the labour market as
workers. What these scholars reveal is how extra-economic
factors related to restrictive citizenship controls and nation-
alist discourses are used to extract labour power and pacify
workers in the service of capitalist accumulation in Canada’s
agri-food sector. The result is the production of an agricul-
tural workforce that is more likely to be compliant and less
able to resist precarious working and living conditions.
That said, while the structure of unfree labour produces
an insidious everyday discipline, there is a need for food
movement activists and scholars to recognize that the agency
of migrant farm workers is always present, at the very least
as an ontological fact (Foucault 1980). Central to the ques-
tion of worker agency and political subjectivity is how the
logic of unfreedom described above influences how workers
come to experience everyday life in Canada (Reid-Musson
2017). As Choudry and Smith (2016a, p.12) observe, the
immigration and employment controls that structure the
SAWP are “enforced at the level of everyday social life and
on the human body.” This observation conjures a reading
of unfree labour whereby the political and economic struc-
tures that produce an unfree condition of work seep into the
private and non-work experiences of workers’ daily lives
(Rogaly 2009; Skrivankova 2010; Strauss 2012). This seep-
age exposes micro-layers of unfreedom that disturb “work-
ers’ control over their own bodies, movement, privacy and
social life” (Lebaron 2015, p.9). The condition of unfree-
dom to which migrant farm workers in Canada are subject
can thus be viewed as a continuum of exploitation that far
“exceeds the effects of a political or economic strategy” and
profoundly affects workers’ private and public lives, their
relationships to each other, and the formation of social and
cultural identities (De Lissovoy 2015, p.63).
Research has shown how the logic of unfreedom that
underlies workers’ social isolation, cultural exclusion, and
a lack of access to labour and mobility rights is legitimized
through a public discourse that portrays workers as cultural
and economic others (Bauder 2008). This is compounded by
workers’ embodied experiences of racialization in the rural,
primarily agricultural, and majority White communities in
which they live (Perry 2012b). In other words, underlying
the very logic of the program is an order of embodied dis-
tribution that classifies SAWP workers as racialized others
within what Bakan (2008, p.5) refers to as “a racialized
culture of hegemonic whiteness.” Culturally, the logic of
unfreedom percolates beneath the surface of workers’ rela-
tionships, structuring their experiences through a condition
of otherness and invisibility, demanding that workers behave
like workers. More than just producing a ‘reliable’ work-
force, this underlying logic of subjection communicates the
expectation that SAWP workers are “to stay in line and make
[themselves] scarce” both inside and outside the workplace
(Fanon 2008, p.94). This produces a hyper-awareness of

J.A.Perry
1 3
their surroundings and of their explicit and limited role in
Canadian society, thus reifying workers’ otherness, shaping
their sense of agency, and stifling workers’ ability to com-
municate dissent, both in private and in public.
Recognizing the socio-cultural effects of unfreedom
and the necessity to cultivate worker agency are crucial to
the development of critical educational interventions. This
means developing creative strategies to address the mate-
rial and cultural obstacles to workers’ speaking out about
farm worker equity. There is a tremendous need to develop
healing and democratic spaces where SAWP workers can
experiment with and perform ways of being that belie the
underlying logic of unfreedom. Food movement activists
can seek out insights and processes from critical pedagogy
as a way to harness worker agency and to spark political
subjectivities that disrupt the “dominative decorum” that
permeates workers’ everyday experience of Canada’s SAWP
(De Lissovoy 2016, p.346). Currently, there is a growing
interest in the application of critical pedagogical methods
among food movement activists and scholars. For example,
Minkoff-Zern (2014) describes how cultural and educational
activities are crucial aspects of developing leadership and
solidarity among farm workers themselves.
Leveraging cultural activities toencourage
communicative parity
How can cultural and educational interventions as sug-
gested by Minkoff-Zern (2014) address the uneven politics
of unfree labour as characterized above? The concept of
‘misrecognition’ as advanced by feminist political theorist
Nancy Fraser (1997, 2013) can assist in developing these
connections. Fraser describes misrecognition as “the mate-
rial construction, through the institutionalization of cultural
norms, of a class of devalued persons who are impeded from
participatory parity” (Fraser 2013, p.180). For Fraser, mis-
recognition takes place when social and political institutions
regulate a particular group’s interactions according to cul-
tural and political norms that “constitute one as compara-
tively unworthy of respect or esteem” (Fraser 2013, p.176),
thus denying particular categories of people the opportunity
to interact with one another as equals. The denial of equi-
table and unrestrained communication in the public realm
to certain groups of people is thus understood as a key ele-
ment of social injustice. Engaging with Fraser’s concept of
misrecognition highlights the importance of addressing the
problem of voice when attending to farm worker equity in
social movement contexts.
In Canada, there are material and ideological factors that
impede migrant farm workers from full social and politi-
cal membership. These contribute to the misrecognition of
SAWP workers, and by extension to the scarcity of worker
involvement in food justice initiatives. In particular, the dis-
ciplinary mechanism of unfree labour as produced through
Canada’s SAWP ensures that workers are unable to perma-
nently settle in Canada. Workers are instead attached to a
single employer throughout the duration of their contracts.
These material restrictions limit workers’ labour and geo-
graphic mobility, increase workers’ risks of experiencing
labour standards abuses, and also limit workers’ ability to
actively contribute to formal and grassroots debates that may
potentially influence public policy. The cultural narratives
that render SAWP workers as outsiders support these insti-
tutional relations, thus legitimating the permanent aliena-
tion of SAWP workers from having their voices heard in
social and political forums. The dynamics of unfree labour,
in tandem with the ideological discourses that legitimize
them, thus produce a “vicious circle of cultural and eco-
nomic subordination” (Fraser 1997, p.15) that codes the
patterns shaping the range of communicative possibilities
available to SAWP workers in their everyday relationships.
The issue of paid farm hands’ absence from Canada’s food
movement is thus not just a problem of advocates’ lack of
access to workers, but is also a consequence of the deeper
problem of workers’ material and cultural exclusion from
social and political life.
In response to the problem of misrecognition, Fraser pos-
its a conception of justice that is grounded in the principle
of “parity of participation”, which “requires social arrange-
ments that permit all (adult) members of society to interact
with one another as peers” (Fraser 2013, p.164). In order
to increase the contribution of farm workers in social move-
ment, migrant and food justice initiatives would do well to
incorporate activities that encourage the type of communi-
cative parity imagined by Fraser. This means developing
educational environments that address the underlying cul-
tural values that serve to justify the broad denial of work-
ers from the rights and protections of full citizenship. In
keeping with Fraser’s notion of parity of participation, this
must include creating spaces where migrant farm workers
can come together to challenge the injuries suffered as a
consequence of their pervasive exclusion from public life.
Canada’s food movement must develop creative opportuni-
ties for workers to contest cultural values that reify migrant
farm worker subordination as the norm.
Cultural and creative activities are not unusual in social
movement organizing. On the contrary, interweaving com-
munity organizing with artistic practices, such as collective
storytelling (Newman 2006) and performance (Hsia 2010),
is increasingly common as a potentially effective grassroots
approach to strengthening the communicative potential
of people from traditionally marginalized groups. Within
the field of critical adult education, the arts have been pro-
posed as an important vehicle to cultivate and communi-
cate counter-hegemonic ideas and to develop relationships

Images ofwork, images ofdefiance: engaging migrant farm worker voice throughcommunity-based…
1 3
of solidarity and connection in social movement contexts
(Butterwick and Roy 2016; Brookfield and Holst 2010; Cho-
udry 2015). Notably, migrant and food justice movements
alike have mobilized artistic forms of “cultural organizing”
to claim public space and to honour both farm workers and
transnational migrants in various international settings as
“creative and purposeful human beings” (Kohl-Arenas etal.
2014, p.12). Both the Landless Farm Worker Movement in
Brazil and Florida’s Coalition for Immokalee Workers for
example have incorporated storytelling, music, and theatri-
cality as a way to build solidarity and forge common identity
among agricultural workers and the general public (Gouge
2015; Hammond 2014; Issa 2007). Other examples, such as
those that have incorporated artistic exploration with trans-
national marriage migrants in Taiwan (Hsia 2010; Liang
2016) and Filipina live-in caregivers in Canada (Butterwick
etal. 2015), have integrated performance as a way to cre-
ate a space where communal migrant subjectivities may be
cultivated. As seen through the lens of Nancy Fraser’s con-
ceptualization of justice, these examples highlight how col-
lective artistic creation can leverage often-untapped cultural
resources to address the problem of misrecognition and to
support parity of participation among traditionally marginal-
ized communities. How can cultural activities be mobilized
with hired farm hands who are affected by unfree labour
policies, such as SAWP workers in the context of Canada’s
horticultural industry? In what follows I discuss the trajec-
tory and results of my own efforts to carve out a space where
SAWP workers are encouraged to contribute their voice to
migrant and food justice activism through cultural and artis-
tic expression.
Engaging migrant farm workers
incommunity‑based arts
The reflection offered in this article is grounded in my
15years of experience as an adult educator, advocate, and
later, as a university-based researcher working with SAWP
workers. My work with migrant workers began with my
position as a labourer-teacher with Frontier College, a well-
established literacy organization in Canada. In this position I
worked as both a farmworker and as a volunteer English as a
Second Language and literacy instructor. In order to sustain
my volunteer work, for 3years I worked and lived alongside
migrant farm workers on tobacco and fruit farms in the agri-
culture-rich region of Southwestern Ontario. My proximity
to workers as a fellow co-worker greatly informed my work
as an advocate and as an educator (Perry 2013). During these
years I spent my evenings and weekends delivering student-
centred language lessons to interested co-workers and their
friends. Lessons were focused on fulfilling workers’ daily
communication needs in the local language, providing a
practical foundation for encouraging worker independence.
After 2years as a language instructor, I was approached
by a group of advanced language learners in the municipal-
ity of Leamington (pop. 27,595), a crucial hub for Canada’s
greenhouse industry. In 2015 (the most recent numbers
available) Leamington was host to 5743 migrant workers,
the vast majority employed in the agri-food industry (Gov-
ernment of Canada 2018). This group of workers wanted
my help to write and perform a collaboratively created play
about their lives as migrant farm workers in Canada. This
group made it clear that they wanted to perform in English,
and that their intended audience would be local Canadians.
Feeling socially and culturally isolated in the town where
they lived, the group’s goal was to employ a creative outlet
to educate locals about their daily lives. Over the course of a
summer, this group of workers met twice a week after work,
often commuting long distances to town by bicycle, to create
and rehearse a short play that was eventually performed for
a mixed audience of SAWP workers and local Canadians at
a community centre. While this project provided a means
for workers to express themselves creatively, workers’ deci-
sion to target an audience that included non-migrant workers
introduced a pedagogical limitation. Namely, with a Cana-
dian audience in mind, this group decided to develop and
publically share a story about life as a migrant worker that
purposefully did not challenge the accepted status quo, so as
to avoid the known social risks associated with workers pub-
licly expressing themselves as political subjects. With the
worry that SAWP employers may be present in the audience
(and some were), the group chose not to document work-
ers’ real-life struggles and instead crafted a light-hearted
love story, thus portraying the SAWP as benign and workers
themselves as gentle and fun-loving neighbours.
The experience of leading this project was both invigorat-
ing and frustrating. On the one hand, having the chance to
help workers to shape and share their own stories in a public
forum was energizing. On the other hand, being constrained
with regards to the types of stories we could share as a group
felt like a missed opportunity. While the production of this
play was considered an important and distinctive cultural
performance that communed a rich emotional depiction of
life in Canada’s SAWP (Hill 2005), it did not embrace an
explicit analysis of how relations of dominance imbue work-
ers’ experiences of work and migration. Could a cultural
activity such as the one proposed by this group of SAWP
workers not be a potentially effective approach to public
and political pedagogy, and contribute in some way to estab-
lished migrant and food justice movements? To the contrary,
this project was illustrative of the challenges associated with
the cultural and material obstacles to inviting SAWP work-
ers to contribute their voices to political struggle. While
artistic activities associated with critical adult education

J.A.Perry
1 3
may offer a means of encouraging workers to express a col-
lective subjectivity (Brookfield and Holst 2010; Hsia 2010;
Newman 2006), in this case the risks associated with public
displays of communal agency suppressed even the percep-
tion that workers were reflecting on and critiquing dominant
social relations. Several years later, as a university-based
researcher, I decided to try this play-making experiment a
second time with a different group of workers. With an eye
to liberating workers from the gaze of employers and the
wider Canadian population, this second project was designed
from the outset to be by and for workers themselves. Given
the results of the previous play-making experiment, I felt
that workers interested in cultural production needed a pri-
vate worker-only space to experiment—a place that was free
from outside scrutiny (see Flores and Garcia 2009). The idea
was to create a space where workers could bear communal
witness to life in the SAWP and where workers’ experien-
tial knowledge of unfree labour could be nurtured. A cru-
cial question animating this decision was related to how an
SAWP worker-only arts-collective could provoke a grass-
roots cultural interchange that could address the problem of
misrecognition as it is expressed through Canada’s managed
labour migration system.
A note onmethods
I base the analysis presented in this article on a series of
theatre workshops conducted with a group of SAWP workers
from Mexico working in Canada’s hydroponic greenhouse
industry. Methodologically, this project was committed to
both emphasizing the agency of participants and to produc-
ing social science research that does not simply document
the social world, but which is active in its very production
(Denzin 2003; Law and Urry 2004). On both of these fronts,
a performative approach to qualitative inquiry offered a rich
and provocative invitation toward engaging with farm work-
ers. To better understand how the application of arts-based
workshops can be harnessed in food movement activism,
this article focuses on cooperative meaning making and
solidarity learning as these occurred during the workshops
themselves and the performance that followed.
The theatre-creation workshop sessions were devel-
oped from well-established community-based approaches
to collective theatre creation, primarily the Theatre of the
Oppressed, a social justice-oriented theatrical technique
developed specifically for use with non-actors by the late
Brazilian theatre director and educator Augusto Boal (1985,
2002). Among activists and arts educators, Boal’s Theatre
of the Oppressed is often portrayed as an artistic technique
for critically examining hegemonic social relations with
and among traditionally marginalized groups (Barak 2016;
Hsia 2010). As per the process of Boal’s work, our sessions
involved the group coming together to examine their eve-
ryday lives through physical movement exercises, theatri-
cal improvisations, in-depth discussions, storytelling, col-
lective play creation, and community-based performance.
The project incorporated three distinct phases: embodied
inquiry, play-creation, and public performance (Perry 2018).
The first phase was grounded in Boal’s technique of ‘image
theatre’ (Boal 2002, pp.139–147). In this phase workers
created static body images of their lives in the SAWP. By
working in mostly silence and focusing primarily on work-
ers’ bodies, this phase was designed to emphasize workers’
non-verbal resources, including emotions, memories, and
workers’ perceptions of embodied interactions with others.
Intended to spark collective memories and new interpreta-
tions of life in the SAWP, these images became a catalyst
for group discussions in which workers shared and compared
their own personal life histories (Perry 2012a). This phase
was followed by the creation of a short play. The collectively
created play was based on the images that were generated in
the previous phase and the discussions that followed. Using
a patchwork of methods derived from Boal’s toolbox, such
as collective improvisation and character development, par-
ticipants constructed a series of dramatic scenes that exam-
ined the challenges associated with a worker’s first year in
the program.
An integral aspect of this project was to provide adequate
space for workers themselves to collectively improvise their
own representations of daily life as migrant farm workers.
In the interests of respecting workers’ own interpretations
of life in Canada’s SAWP, participants were therefore
fully engaged in all aspects of developing artistic depic-
tions (Sinding etal. 2008). This meant that all participants
were involved in artistic creation and that all of the images,
characters, dialogue, and scenes that workers created were
examined in relation to each individual worker’s lived expe-
riences, worldviews, and personal beliefs. All of the voices
present were therefore urged to partake in a conversation
of how to best portray the intimate realities of life for par-
ticipants. In practical terms, this meant encouraging partici-
pants to pause the workshop activities at any time in order
to discuss in more detail the topic at hand. The process of
engaging with a multiplicity of worker voices deepened
the ethical grounding of the project and strengthened the
accuracy of artistic representations prior to public scrutiny
(Conquergood 1985; Mienczakowski 1999). Unlike the pre-
vious play that was created for a mixed audience of workers
and Canadians, the play that participants created expressly
probed some difficult material, such as uneven power rela-
tions in the workplace, co-worker harassment, problematic
interactions with program officials, and loneliness. After the
play was created and rehearsed, we invited an audience of
25 fellow workers to attend the final performance. The pres-
entation was designed as a community forum. This involved

Images ofwork, images ofdefiance: engaging migrant farm worker voice throughcommunity-based…
1 3
incorporating a facilitated discussion meant to elicit the
audiences’ responses to both the content covered in the play
as well as the experience of being involved in a worker-led
dialogue on their lives in the SAWP.
In an effort to access workers most obviously denied the
status as ‘peer’ as per Fraser’s conceptualization of mis-
recognition, my goal was to enlist workers who were not
already involved in community organizing. The rationale
was to encourage workers who did not already have the
experience of expressing themselves in a public and overtly
political way to experiment with the development of a com-
munal voice. While I was no longer volunteering as a lan-
guage instructor at the time, I was given permission by Fron-
tier College to attend several of their Leamington classes
in order to pitch my idea to potential participants. In these
presentations I told workers about my own experiences as
a farmworker and volunteer advocate, and told them about
the previous theatre-making project. I informed workers that
the point of the current project was to bring workers together
to build community and to create and share stories amongst
themselves that were relevant to their true-to-life struggles as
migrant farm workers in Canada. I explained that the project
would be limited to workers only, and that no members of
the local community would be involved in either the work-
shops or the public performance. In this way, I was able to
offer workers an assurance of relative confidentiality.
Interested workers were also made aware that this endeav-
our was associated with a university-based research project
that examined the efficacy of artistic interventions to create
meaningful stories that support worker solidarity and par-
ity of participation. On this front, I asked workers’ permis-
sion to observe their interactions during the theatre-creation
workshops and to include their anonymized exchanges in
future reports and publications. Audience members (who
were also SAWP workers) were similarly informed of the
research dimension of the project, and were likewise asked
for their consent to participate. In the end, I enlisted a group
of nine SAWP workers from Mexico to contribute to a thea-
tre creation and performance project that lasted throughout
a complete agricultural season. The workers who were most
eager to take part in this project were individuals who had
expressed a desire to develop social connections outside of
work through involvement in activities separate from their
working lives. For these amateur worker-artists, our weekly
workshops were both an opportunity to socialize with like-
minded workers and a means to express parts of their iden-
tities that normally lie dormant throughout their sojourns
in Canada. Those workers who stated their motivation for
participating in the project discussed how they found mean-
ing in creating art that mirrored their own experiences and
those of their fellow SAWP workers. One worker (Joaquín)1
expressed this sentiment thus:
The project is important because the play expresses
the situations that we are living as migrant workers.2
For these workers having the chance to express them-
selves artistically was especially appealing. In the words of
one worker (Enrique):
I liked the idea of being in a play about Mexicans. I
always wanted to participate in something like this.
Well, when you invited me it got me really excited.
Drawing from my own observations of participant inter-
actions during this project, in what follows I offer a glimpse
of how artistic educational interventions with migrant
farm workers may be one way to incorporate the voices of
food labourers into migrant and food justice movements.
By focusing most of the analysis on the first, ‘image thea-
tre’ phase of this project, I examine how simple theatrical
explorations can offer a unique means of accessing workers’
embodied experiences of work, unfree labour, and social
struggle. I reveal how a thoughtful exploration of workers’
experiential knowledge of life in Canada’s SAWP can facili-
tate critical collective discussions of how power infiltrates
workers’ everyday lives. The discussion below demonstrates
how in-depth investigations of the memories and emotions
that undergird workers’ experiences of manual agricultural
labour produced an opportunity to augment participants’
capacity to communicate a collectively produced reflec-
tion on worker camaraderie, worker agency and the logic
of unfree labour.
Images ofwork, images ofdeance
Work
You have to live what we live in your own body to
know what we feel. The play more than anything pro-
vides a reflection on what it is we are living through
here in Canada as workers… on what we are really
living through.
An (anonymous) SAWP worker expressed this provoca-
tive statement during the post-performance discussion at the
end of the arts project described in this article. This quote
demonstrates the importance of engaging with farm workers’
experiential knowledge of life in Canada’s SAWP as a way
1 I provided workshop participants with pseudonyms.
2 Worker quotes have been translated to English from the original
Spanish.

J.A.Perry
1 3
of learning about the lived realities of unfree labour rela-
tions. For critical adult educators, finding a way to encour-
age workers to physically interrogate the social relations
that shape their daily lives is crucial to incorporating the
voices of SAWP workers in food movement activism, as is
suggested in the literature reviewed above. In keeping with
this goal, the first phase of this project involved facilitat-
ing ‘image theatre’ exercises with the group. Practitioners
of the Theatre of the Oppressed describe the technique of
image theatre as “a series of wordless exercises in which
participants create embodiments of their feelings and expe-
riences” (Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz 1994, p.237). Given
this technique’s emphasis on accessing memories, emotions
and other physical experiences that may be difficult to articu-
late clearly in spoken language, I chose image theatre spe-
cifically because of its potential to engage workers’ tacit and
embodied knowledge of everyday life (Perry 2018).
During the first few sessions, an explicit focus on embod-
ied knowledge did not immediately produce in-depth explo-
rations of what could be characterized as workers’ experi-
ential knowledge of unfree labour relations. Rather, when
workers were offered the chance to use their bodies to com-
municate information about their lives in the SAWP, they
instinctively created images that depicted the simple eve-
ryday actions and situations associated with physical agri-
cultural labour. For example, during the early stages of the
project, workers created images of picking tomatoes, tying
the vines of tomato plants, and of manipulating complex
greenhouse machinery. This was not surprising, seeing as
though SAWP labourers often work upwards of 60-h weeks
and are drawn from the ranks of racialized global labour-
ing classes (Basok 2002; Smith 2016). These are workers
for whom rich and varied experiences of manual labour
are deeply embedded in their embodied understandings of
daily life. SAWP workers’ day-to-day activities at work were
therefore easily recreated through theatrical image making.
In the words of one project participant (Mauricio):
We do these activities all day everyday. These actions
are impossible to forget.
These images offered more than just a surface-level repre-
sentation of participants’ working lives, however. By coming
together on a weekly basis to engage in an artistic explora-
tion workers developed affective camaraderie grounded in
their own intimate experiences of agricultural work, which
provided an effective means of developing a communal sub-
jectivity. For example, during the workshops participants
discussed openly how creating theatrical images of work
sparked individual memories of their lives in the program
that merged with the collective memory of the group. This
was particularly true for one worker (Enrique), who was in
his first year in the program at the time of research and was
particularly struck by how the experiences of older workers
mirrored his own. Reflecting on an image created by one
of his more senior co-workers that depicted his employer
yelling at him on his first day of work, Enrique commented:
I remembered when I first came into the program.
Joaquín’s story was almost exactly the same as what
happened to me.
Connecting the individual memory of work to the collec-
tive memory of exploitation may thus have supported the
development of a communal understanding of the SAWP
experience. The workshops thereby provided a space for
workers to develop a shared sense of responsibility and
care, thus triggering an important interruption of workers’
everyday experiences of social exclusion and isolation. For
example, during these initial theatre workshops it was not
unusual for older workers to stop the action in order to pro-
vide council to younger workers on how to develop practical
strategies to protect their bodies from long-term injuries.
This collective interrogation of how life in the SAWP could
be represented through a commonly understood physical
vernacular provided a central foundation for surfacing work-
ers’ embodied knowledge of broader social relations.
Defiance
In an effort to deepen the analysis, these embodied images
of work were “brought to life” through interactive exercises
known to Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners as ‘dynam-
izing’ activities (Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz 1994, p.237).
With varying degrees of success, and using assorted impro-
visational tools, I encouraged participants to reflect on the
internal and external forces that animated the collectively
created physical images of agricultural labour. For example,
during this phase participants improvised the development
of different characters, such as SAWP employers, govern-
ment officials, spouses, and fellow workers. These improvi-
sations presented a window to interrogating the underlying
emotions, motivations, and political interests that determine
workers’ everyday experiences of work. In one activity that
proved particularly fruitful, in the process of demonstrat-
ing previously created images of greenhouse work, I asked
participants to express their character’s ‘inner monologues’
(Boal 2002, p.207). In this exercise, participants voiced the
inner thoughts of the characters (i.e. workers, employers,
consular officials) involved in the images of work that they
had already created. These otherwise innocuous images
of agricultural labour were thus transformed. From these
images participants created polyphonic soundscapes that
evoked a potent account of how power, as filtered through
the policies and practices of unfree labour, shapes the
embodied everyday experience of life in Canada’s SAWP.
As an example, the following internal monologues devel-
oped from an image of greenhouse work are illustrative.

Images ofwork, images ofdefiance: engaging migrant farm worker voice throughcommunity-based…
1 3
One participant, who was playing the part of an employer,
voiced his complaints about his Mexican employees work-
ing too slowly and decided that he would threaten to send
them back to Mexico in order to make them work faster.
Another participant, who was playing a worker in his first
SAWP season, extracted a litany of profane language thrown
in the direction of his employer, who he felt was treating him
unfairly. The next participant, playing the part of a worker,
spoke to his spouse about how much he missed her, and that
he hoped working in Canada would provide financial oppor-
tunities for their family. A fourth participant, also playing
the role of a worker, expressed his fear that the employer
would punish him and his fellow co-workers because one
member of his crew was working too slowly. Voicing the
private concerns of fictional (but true-to-life) SAWP charac-
ters that they themselves created encouraged participants to
critically examine how the policies and practices of unfree
labour may infiltrate workers’ bodies and structure their eve-
ryday relationships.
Unlike earlier discussions that focused primarily on
building workers’ long-term physical resilience to the bod-
ily hardships associated with farm work, these moments pro-
voked conversations in which workers shared and compared
memories of unjust treatment and debated the risks associ-
ated with speaking out. These discussions in turn provided
the groundwork for developing embodied images of defiance
that could then be incorporated into migrant and food justice
organizing. To illustrate: at the time this phase of the project
was taking place, the volunteer-led migrant justice collec-
tive, Justicia for Migrant Workers was organizing a cam-
paign called the ‘Pilgrimage to Freedom’, a summer-long
action which involved grassroots activists and migrant farm
workers staging events across the province of Ontario. Event
organizers invited interested workers from our group to join
a small group of worker-activists to create dramatic images
that could be incorporated into the caravan’s communica-
tions strategy, such as campaign posters and banners. This
invitation provided a means for this group of artist-workers
to contribute to public and political pedagogy while at the
same time maintaining their anonymity. Prior to this gather-
ing, I invited workers to bring objects that for them repre-
sented different aspects of their lives in Canada. On the day
of the workshop we had a motley collection of farm-related
objects, including various small agricultural tools as well
as an assortment of tomatoes and cucumbers. Using these
objects as props, throughout the day, this blended group of
workers collectively created images meant to represent both
the realities of workers’ lives and the broader struggle for
farm worker equity.
By the end of this session, the collective of workers had
settled on one particular image that we felt captured work-
ers’ experiential knowledge of manual work, unfree labour,
and social struggle. In the image (Fig.1), a hand holding a
tomato represents manual work, a chain wrapped around the
worker’s hand and arm symbolizes unfree labour, and a fist
raised in defiance embodies the idea of social struggle. This
image was transformed into a digital image that was later
attached to Justicia for Migrant Workers’s 2016 ‘Harvesting
Freedom’ campaign (Justicia for Migrant Workers 2017), a
Canada-wide migrant justice event that commemorated the
50-year anniversary of Canada’s SAWP (Fig.2) (Justicia for
Migrant Workers 2017). Depictions of manual labour were
thus transformed into embodied images that contributed to
on-the-ground migrant and food justice activism. This exam-
ple demonstrates how a recognized arts-based educational
practice can be taken up in the service of increasing the com-
municative capacity of migrant farm workers in the context
of community organizing. The use of Augusto Boal’s tech-
nique of image theatre was particularly useful in accessing
workers’ embodied knowledge of work, unfree labour, and
social struggle. This technique, which focused on engag-
ing workers’ bodies in a collective investigation of life in
Canada’s SAWP, provided a creative means to spark not only
a sense of affective camaraderie and communal subjectiv-
ity amongst workers not normally engaged in social move-
ment, but also to provoke conversations that may otherwise
not have taken place. Crucial to this approach is how arts
workshops provided a grassroots mechanism for coopera-
tively examining some of the most salient and richest mate-
rial available for engaging workers in struggles for justice,
namely workers’ own direct experiences of physical labour.
A note onpublic performance
The eventual performance derived from the images
described here provides further evidence as to the potential
and the obstacles for community-based artistic practice to
contribute to discussions of farm worker equity. This per-
formance took place near the end of the agricultural sea-
son. Fellow SAWP workers who were in attendance were
invited to participate in a discussion on the utility of artistic
creation to communicate workers’ impressions of life in the
program. These workers’ comments highlight how artistic
expression can provoke strong feelings regarding workers’
own perceptions of whether or not they are capable of or
even entitled to expressing discontent. On the one hand,
some workers expressed consternation on witnessing work-
ers express oppositional subjectivities on the stage. The fol-
lowing anonymous audience comments reflect this position:
If we present this to the public, well, I don’t know.
Like what do you think? What would the Canadian
government say? What would the Mexican consulate
say? They might just grab you and ask ‘who gave you
the permission to have this idea?’

J.A.Perry
1 3
We have a situation here, because Canadians will
say, ‘who let them do this’? The bosses will say, the
Mexican consulate will say, the Mexican Ministry of
Labour will say, ‘who let them do this?’ The bosses
would not like to see this. They would send us all
back to Mexico.
On the other hand, some workers felt as though play
creation and performance could provide an effective way to
increase workers’ communicative capacity. The following
comments reflect this position:
The play releases the burden that we all have, to let it
go, to express it. It is a way to rebel against the situa-
tion that we are all living, because the other option is
to just remain silent.
Do you have courage, or what? I have courage, and for
me, I would perform this play in public because eve-
rything is shown—the good and the bad. Think about
the consequences that this play could have. If people
could start to see all these things, I don’t know how
far it would go, but it would create a real commotion.
Workers’ performative subversion of the accepted
norms of what it means to be a migrant farm worker in
Canada through theatre creation sparked an emotional dia-
logue among those workers present in the audience. That
audience members were so animated in their responses to
the artistic expression of their fellow workers demonstrates
how deeply enmeshed this project was in bringing to light
the politics of worker representation in social struggle.
Fig. 1 Image of defiance

Images ofwork, images ofdefiance: engaging migrant farm worker voice throughcommunity-based…
1 3
While no clear resolution came out of this discussion, its
very occurrence represents an incremental step toward
participatory parity in the struggle to incorporate migrant
farm worker voice into food justice organizing. Work-
ers’ collective exploration of manual agricultural work,
as expressed through the artistic engagement of workers’
actual bodies, presented an opportunity to aesthetically tap
into workers’ emotions, memories, and embodied experi-
ences of unfree labour. This initiative offered a group of
farm workers the time and space to reflect on their lives,
and a relatively low-risk platform from which they could
explore how they may want their voices heard within the
contemporary food and migrant justice movements. Bor-
rowing insights from Fraser (1997, 2013), this project
provided a cultural platform for migrant farm workers to
interact as peers in such a way that invokes the prospective
of engaging with participatory parity in the migrant justice
and food sovereignty movements.
Fig. 2 2016 harvesting freedom
campaign logo

J.A.Perry
1 3
Conclusion
Are there aspects of this small-scale community-based thea-
tre project that address the problem, as articulated in the
literature, of connecting the struggles of actual farm work-
ers to the wider food justice movement? In the context of
Canadian agri-business, this question must be framed in
relation to the dynamics of unfree labour, and how these
shape migrant farm workers’ experiences of life in Canada’s
Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. The notion of unfree
labour that I examine in this article is gaining currency of
late in the labour migration scholarship coming out of the
Canadian context, and for good reason. Engaging with the
idea of unfree labour provides a useful conceptual tool
for understanding how restrictive citizenship controls and
nationalist discourses are put to work in extracting labour
control and pacifying workers in Canada’s agricultural sec-
tor. In addition to restricting the political, geographic and
labour mobility of SAWP workers, the logic of unfreedom
that undergirds the structure of transnational agricultural
employment in Canada is an insidious form of everyday dis-
cipline. The politics of unfree labour that variously constrain
SAWP workers’ opportunities to participate as full com-
munity members through mechanisms such as the constant
threat of deportation, are thus sutured to workers’ embodied
experiences of daily life. I thereby introduce the concept
of misrecognition as posited by Nancy Fraser as a way to
further deepen our understanding of how the cultural and
economic politics of unfree labour infiltrate SAWP work-
ers’ everyday relationships. By inspecting Canada’s SAWP
through the lens of misrecognition, I make the case that the
politics of unfree labour produce communicative constraints
for farm workers that profoundly affect their opportunities
to interact as equals in Canadian society. This presents a
grave problem for Canadian food justice advocates who are
interested in engaging farm workers in public conversations
around farmworker equity and food sovereignty. However,
in this article I argue that Canada’s migrant and food justice
advocates must address the lack of communicative resources
available to SAWP workers in order to address problems
related to the exploitation of food labourers. Educational
interventions designed to encourage migrant farm workers’
contribution to social movements must therefore tackle the
socio-cultural obstacles that constrict migrant farm workers’
opportunities to participate as full members of their commu-
nities. When designed thoughtfully, social justice oriented
approaches to community-based arts can provide one way
of accomplishing this objective.
Acknowledgements The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge
the helpful comments of the three anonymous reviewers during the
preparation of this manuscript. The funding was supported by Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant No.
752-2011-2626).
Compliance with ethical standards
Ethical approval All procedures performed in studies involving human
participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Uni-
versity of Toronto and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later
amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Informed consent Informed consent was obtained from all individual
participants included in the study.
References
Allen, P. 2008. Mining for justice in the food system: Perceptions,
practices, and possibilities. Agriculture and Human Values 25(2):
157–161.
Bakan, A. B. 2008. Reconsidering the underground railroad: Slavery
and racialization in the making of the Canadian state. Socialist
Studies 4(1): 3–29.
Barak, A. 2016. Critical consciousness in critical social work: Learn-
ing from the Theatre of the Oppressed. British Journal of Social
Work 6(1): 1776–1792.
Basok, T. 2002. Tortillas and tomatoes: transmigrant Mexican har-
vesters in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Basok, T., D. Bélanger, and E. Rivas. 2014. Reproducing deportability:
Migrant agricultural workers in South-western Ontario. Journal
of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40(9): 1394–1413.
Bauder, H. 2008. Foreign farm workers in Ontario (Canada): Exclu-
sionary discourse in the newsprint media. Journal of Peasant
Studies 35(1): 100–118.
Boal, A. 1985. Theatre of the oppressed. New York: Theatre Com-
munications Group.
Boal, A. 2002. Games for actors and non-actors. London: Routledge.
Brookfield, S., and J. Holst. 2010. Radicalizing learning: Adult educa-
tion for a just world. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Butterwick, S., and C. Roy. 2016. Working the margins of community-
based adult learning. New York: Springer.
Butterwick, S., M. Carrillo, and K. Villagente. 2015. Women’s fashion
shows as feminist transformation. The Canadian Journal for the
Study of Adult Education 27(2): 79–99.
Choudry, A. 2015. Learning activism: The intellectual life of contem-
porary social movements. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Choudry, A., and A. Smith. 2016a. Introduction: Struggling against
unfree labour. In Unfree labour? Struggles of migrant and immi-
grant workers in Canada, eds. A. Choudry, and A. Smith, 1–20.
Oakland: PM Press.
Choudry, A., and A. Smith, eds. 2016b. Unfree labour? Struggles of
migrant and immigrant workers in Canada. Oakland: PM Press.
Conquergood, D. 1985. Performance as moral act: Ethical dimensions
of ethnography of performance. Literature in Performance 5(2):
1–13.
De Genova, N. 2005. Working the boundaries: Race, space, and “ille-
gality” in Mexican Chicago. Durham: Duke University Press.
De Lissovoy, N. 2015. Education and emancipation in the neoliberal
era: Being, teaching, and power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
De Lissovoy, N. 2016. Race, reason and reasonableness: Toward an
“unreasonable” pedagogy. Educational Studies 52(4): 346–362.
Denzin, N. K. 2003. Performance ethnography: Critical pedagogy and
the politics of culture. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Images ofwork, images ofdefiance: engaging migrant farm worker voice throughcommunity-based…
1 3
Ekers, M., C. Z. Levkoe, S. Walker, and B. Dale. 2016. Will work
for food: Agricultural interns, apprentices, volunteers, and
the agrarian question. Agriculture and Human Values 33(3):
705–720.
Fanon, F. 2008. [1952] Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove
Press.
Feagan, R. 2007. The place of food: Mapping out the “local” in local
food systems. Progress in Human Geography 31(1): 23–42.
Flores, J., and S. Garcia. 2009. Latina testimonios: A reflexive, critical
analysis of ‘Latina space’ at a predominantly White campus. Race,
Ethnicity and Education 12(2): 155–172.
Foucault, M. 1980. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other
writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books.
Fraser, N. 1997. Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the ‘post-
socialist’ condition. New York: Routledge.
Fraser, N. 2013. Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism
to neoliberal crisis. London: Verso.
Gottlieb, R., and A. Joshi. 2010. Food justice. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gouge, M. C. 2015. Human rights in play, transnational solidarity at
work: Creative playfulness and subversive storytelling among
the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Critical Sociology 42(6):
861–875.
Government of Canada. 2018. Annual labour market impact assess-
ment statistics 2008–2015 by urban area. https ://www.canad a.ca/
en/emplo yment -socia l-devel opmen t/servi ces/forei gn-worke rs/
repor ts/2014/lmia-annua l-stati stics /urban -area.html. Accessed
10 March 2018.
Gray, M. 2014. Labor and the locavore: The making of a comprehen-
sive food ethic. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hammond, J. L. 2014. Mística, meaning and popular education in the
Brazilian Landless Workers Movement. Interface: A Journal for
and about Social Movements 6(1): 372–391.
Hill, S. 2005. Migrant workers take to stage. Windsor Star, August 19.
Hjalmarson, E., R. Bunn, A. Cohen, E. Terbasket, and L. Gahman.
2015. Race, food, and borders: Situating migrant struggle in the
Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. Journal of Agriculture, Food
Systems, and Community Development 5(4): 77–82.
Hsia, Hsiao-Chuan. 2010. The subjectivation of marriage migrants in
Taiwan: The insiders’ perspectives. In Learning from the ground
up: Global perspectives on social movements and knowledge pro-
duction, eds. A. Choudry, and D. Kapoor, 101–120. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Issa, D. 2007. Praxis of empowerment: Mística and mobilization in
Brazil’s landless rural workers’ movement. Latin American Per-
spectives 34(2): 124–138.
Justicia for Migrant Workers. 2017. Harvesting freedom. https ://harve
sting freed om.org/. Accessed 24 Oct 2017.
Kohl-Arenas, E., M. M. Nateras, and J. Taylor. 2014. Cultural organiz-
ing as critical praxis: Tamejavi builds immigrant voice, belonging,
and power. Journal of Poverty 18(1): 5–24.
Law, J., and J. Urry. 2004. Enacting the social. Economy and Society
33(3): 390–410.
Lebaron, G. 2015. Unfree labour beyond binaries: Insecurity, social
hierarcy and labour market restructuring. International Feminist
Journal of Politics 17(1): 1–19.
Levkoe. 2017. Engaging the tensions of ecological internships: Con-
siderations for agroecology and sustainable food systems move-
ments. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. https ://doi.
org/10.1080/21683 565.2017.13471 20.
Levkoe, C. Z., N. McClintock, L.-A. Minkoff-Zern, A. K. Coplen, J.
Gaddis, J. Lo, and A. M. Weiler. 2016. Forging links between food
chain labor activists and academics. Journal of Agriculture, Food
Systems, and Community Development 6(2): 129–142.
Liang, P. 2016. Interweaving ethics and aesthetics: Marriage migrants
and theatre making in the Asian transnational space. Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies 17(3): 334–356.
Mienczakowski, J. 1999. Ethnography in the hands of participants:
Tools for dramatic discovery. In Explorations of methodology,
eds. G. Walford, and A. Massey, 145–161. Bingley: Emerald
Group Publishing Limited.
Minkoff-Zern, L.-A. 2014. Challenging the agrarian imaginary:
Farmworker-led food movements and the potential for farm
labor justice. Human Geography 7(1): 85–101.
Nakache, D., and P. J. Kinoshita. 2010. The Canadian temporary
foreign worker program: Do short term economic needs prevail
over human rights concerns? Montreal: Institute for Research
on Public Policy.
Newman, M. 2006. Teaching defiance: Stories and strategies for
adult educators. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Perry, J. A. 2012a. A silent revolution: ‘Image theatre’ as a system
of decolonization. Research in Drama Education: The Journal
of Applied Theatre and Performance 17(1): 103–119.
Perry, J. A. 2012b. Barely legal: Racism and migrant farm labour in
the context of Canadian multiculturalism. Citizenship Studies
16(2): 189–201.
Perry, J. A. 2013. Living and learning through solidarity and
struggle: Assessing the informal learning of Frontier College
labourer-teachers. In Volunteer work, informal learning and
social action, eds. F. Duguid, K. Mündel, and D. Schugurensky,
79–99. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Perry, J. A. 2018. Play-making with migrant farm workers in Ontario,
Canada: A kinesthetic and embodied approach to qualitative
research. Qualitative Research. https ://doi.org/10.1177/14687
94117 74346 3.
Preibisch, K. 2010. Pick-your-own labor: Migrant workers and flex-
ibility in Canadian agriculture. International Migration Review
44(2): 404–441.
Preibisch, K. 2012. Migrant workers and changing work-place
regimes in contemporary agricultural production in Canada.
International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food
19(1): 62–82.
Ramsaroop, C. 2016. The case for unemployment insurance benefits
for migrant agricultural workers in Canada. In Unfree labour?
Struggles of migrant and immigrant workers in Canada, eds. A.
Choudry, and A. Smith, 105–122. Oakland: PM Press.
Reid-Musson, E. 2017. Intersectional rhythmanalysis: Power,
rhythm, and everyday life. Progress in Human Geography. https
://doi.org/10.1177/03091 32517 72506 9.
Rogaly, B. 2009. Spaces of work and everyday life: Labour geogra-
phies and the agency of unorganized temporary migrant work-
ers. Geography Compass 3: 1975–1987.
Sachs, C., P. Allen, A. R. Terman, J. Hayden, and C. Hatcher. 2014.
Front and back of the house: Socio-spatial inequalities in food
work. Agriculture and Human Values 31(3): 3–17.
Satzewich, V. 1991. Racism and the incorporation of foreign labour:
Farm labour migration to Canada since 1945. New York:
Routledge.
Schutzman, M., and J. Cohen-Cruz, eds. 1994. Playing boal: Thea-
tre, therapy, activism. New York: Routledge.
Sharma, N. 2006. Home economics: Nationalism in the making of
“migrant workers” in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Sharma, N. 2012. The “difference” that borders make: “Temporary
foreign workers” and the social organization of unfreedom in
Canada. In Legislated inequality: Temporary labour migration
in Canada, eds. P. T. Lenard, and C. Straehle, 26–47. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Sinding, C., R. Gray, and J. Nisker. 2008. Ethical issues and issues
of ethics. In Handbook of the arts in qualitative research, eds.
J. G. Knowles, and A. L. Cole, 459–468. Los Angeles: Sage
Publications.

J.A.Perry
1 3
Skrivankova, K. 2010. Between decent work and forced labour: Exam-
ining the continuum of exploitation. New York: Joseph Rowntree
Foundation.
Smith, A. 2016. Migration, development and security within racialised
global capitalism: Refusing the balance game. Third World Quar-
terly 37(11): 2119–2138.
Strauss, K. 2012. Coerced, forced and unfree labour: Geographies of
exploitation in contemporary labour markets. Geography Com-
pass 6(3): 137–148.
Thomas, M. 2016. Producing and contesting “unfree labour” through
the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. In Unfree labour?
Struggles of migrant and immigrant workers in Canada, eds. A.
Choudry, and A. Smith, 21–36. Oakland: PM Press.
Vosko, L. F. 2016. Blacklisting as a modality of deportability: Mexi-
co’s response to circular migrant agricultural workers’ pursuit of
collective bargaining rights in British Columbia, Canada. Journal
of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42(8): 1371–1387.
Weiler, A., C. Levkoe, and C. Young. 2016. Cultivating equitable
ground: Community-based participatory research to connect food
movements with migrant farmworkers. Journal of Agriculture,
Food Systems, and Community Development 6(2): 73–87.
J. Adam Perry (www.adamp erry.ca) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow
cross appointed between the School of the Arts and the School Social
Work at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. His research inter-
ests include migrant justice, migrant mobility, immigration policy, pre-
carious work, employment policy, and community-based arts practice.