Laboring Landscapes: Workers’ Agency in Transforming Agricultural Spaces
Session 07 at Architecture and Labour, III Colonial and Postcolonial Landscapes International Congress
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon | 11–13 February 2026
We invite paper proposals for Session 07 – Laboring Landscapes: Workers’ Agency in Transforming Agricultural Spaces.
Sugar cane from the Caribbean and South Asia; aesthetically–perfect, yet pathogen–susceptible bananas from the Philippines, Brazil, Ecuador, and Colombia; trademarked pineapples from Costa Rica; palm oil from Malaysian and Indonesia farms; cotton extracted from Uzbekistan and India; industrial-scale soybeans processed in Argentina; grains from the U.S. Corn Belt; and strawberries grown in chemically-fueled Californian farms. Agriculture has been instrumental in shaping modern space, entangled with colonialism, extraction, consumerism, depletion, and dispossession, with labor at its core. From plantation economies dependent on enslaved and indentured labor to transnational corporations reliant on precarious and underpaid workers, the legacy of agriculture’s extractive systems continues to shape livelihoods, land use patterns, and environmental relations.
The workforce behind food production transforms rural and industrial landscapes that sustain industrial-scale agriculture. Yet labor as a material force remains largely absent —with exceptions— from spatial and infrastructural analysis of agribusiness. As political scientist Andrés León-Araya argues, workers do more than earn a living in agriculture; their labor actively produces the landscapes of agricultural production. The production of agricultural spaces is not neutral; rather, it is the site where the export-driven economy’s push to structure space and time meets workers’ subjectivities—shaped by bodily experiences. Thus, focusing on labor integrates the experiences of workers who traverse between the physical spaces of agricultural production and their communities into our spatial understanding of agribusiness.
Furthermore, we ask: How does exploring labor help us grasp the ways and logics that subvert, negotiate, and reshape agricultural spaces through collective everyday practices? Our session welcomes contributions exploring the spatial interrelationships among agricultural landscapes and typologies—fields, mills, cold-storage warehouses, packing plants, factories, laboratories, transport and irrigation infrastructure— and labor. We seek interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches addressing labor’s role in the design, construction, and operation of agricultural spaces at bodily, local, regional, and global scales.
We welcome contributions that examine the interrelationships between labor and spatial typologies such as fields, mills, irrigation systems, packing plants, cold-storage warehouses, factories, or transport networks. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches across architecture, history, geography, anthropology, labor studies, and environmental humanities are encouraged.
Submission Period: March 20, 2025 to May 20, 2025
Submit proposals (in English) via: https://forms.gle/TDXj6piGKzhgrSJa8
Proposal Requirements:
- Selected session (Session 07 – Laboring Landscapes)
- Title
- Abstract (max 300 words)
- Author(s) name(s), email(s), and institutional affiliation(s)
- Short CV (max 100 words)
For inquiries, please contact:
Dr. Natalia Solano-Meza (School of Architecture, University of Costa Rica) – natalia.solanomeza@ucr.ac.cr
Dr. Silvia Mata-Marín (School of Arts, University of Costa Rica) – silvia.matamarin@ucr.ac.cr