Beyond Guestworker Agriculture: Migrant Labour, Food Regimes and Rural Transformation across East Asia and Southern Europe

Contemporary scholarship on migrant labour in agriculture has made significant contributions to understanding how global food systems depend on temporary, racialized and legally vulnerable workers. Studies of guestworker programmes, seasonal recruitment, irregular labour markets and labour intermediaries have shown how agri-food production is sustained through mobility restrictions, employer dependency, debt, deportability and unequal access to rights. Yet these debates often remain centred on receiving-country labour regimes or single regional cases, leaving less explored how migrant agricultural labour is assembled through transnational recruitment infrastructures, rural restructuring and household strategies across borders.

This session shifts the analytical focus from guestworker agriculture to the wider social relations that make migrant labour available, governable and replaceable. Rather than treating migration schemes as isolated policy instruments, it examines how food regimes, demographic change, rural transformation and cross-border labour intermediation jointly shape dependence on migrant workers.

We invite theoretical, comparative and empirical papers on East Asia, Southern Europe and connected sending contexts. Possible topics include technical training and employer-tied visas; seasonal recruitment; cooperative-based recruitment; brokers, debts and training institutions; bilateral agreements; irregularized labour; labour control and mobility restrictions; gender, family and social reproduction; technological change; worker resistance; and migrant incorporation in rural communities.

By foregrounding these connections, the session aims to expand dialogue among the sociology of agriculture and food, migration studies, rural sociology and political economy, while contributing to a global sociology attentive to the workers, households, intermediaries and communities that sustain contemporary food systems.