Browsing by Author "Haspolat, Gizem"

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    Cheap Meat, Plastic Lives: Cattle Imports, Veterinary Care and Shifting Livestock Economies in Turkey
    (2025-04-25) Haspolat, Gizem; Gunel, Gokce
    This dissertation explores Turkey’s "cheap meat policy" and the traffic in cattle through an ethnographic study of live animal imports. It investigates how cattle are turned into globally traded commodities by focusing on two interconnected dimensions: the sensorial frictions of global live trade and the longer histories of (forced) animal mobilities. The research centers on underexplored sites of the Animal Industrial Complex (Noske 1989), such as importing companies, ports, customs areas, and agricultural expos, where cattle are (re)made into globally tradable commodities. It emphasizes the importance of sensory experience, especially touch and smell, in mediating and at times disrupting the smooth functioning of the traffic in cattle, which situates live imports not just as an economic exchange, but a system that reorganizes and consolidates certain roles ascribed to cattle, veterinarians, importers, and state representatives in their respective ways. By foregrounding the labor, infrastructure, and political strategies required to sustain import-driven livestock economies, the dissertation highlights tensions between economic imperatives and the embodied, sensory presence of living beings in global trade. Rather than approaching “cheap meat” through consumption or as a given category, it focuses on the political-economic processes that situate it as a reflection of claims over welfare and development, which defer conversations around agricultural transformations in Turkey, international regulatory frameworks, and internal conflict and displacement. These longer histories shape the organization of live trade and reveal continuities in global systems of forced mobilities and exploitation, exemplified by live carrier ships functioning as “floating barns.” While these recurrent histories underscore the exhaustive powers of animal capitalism, they also introduce frictions, failures, and resistances that challenge capital’s totalizing grip.