(Un)making Europe through commodity circulation or what’s a chicken to Europe?

Abstract

Europe or in fact multiple “Europes” are continuously produced, materialized, imagined, challenged, temporally fixed and negotiated through policies, scientific discourses and various mundane practices. In this contribution, I want to shed light on how Europe is performed throughout commodity circulation. In doing so, I intend to bring debates from critical political geographies and economic geographies into fruitful dialogue, taking a more-than-human perspective.

Commodities are constantly in becoming, nothing but “a temporary moment in an endless process of assembling materials” (Gregson et al. 2010, 853). They are a “bundle of social relations” (Watts 2014, 394), a materialization of heterogenous association that “make” them. Throughout their mobilization and circulation certain places, spaces and human and more-than-human entities are brought and temporally held together. In my PhD project, I am interested in the ways how Europe is b/ordered (Boeckler and Berndt 2014) – how different Europe(s) are assembled – throughout these commodity circulations. Therefore, I follow (Cook 2004, Pereira 2023) chicken commodities (e.g. chicken nuggets, chicken wings, chicken fillets) in Southeast Europe, moving in and through time and relational space, constructing a multi-sited terrain (Marcus 1995).

Building on first results and selected examples, I highlight more-than-human mobilities that often remain overlooked in political geography discourses and the ways in which they make and unmake Europe(s).