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Rendering's recursions : industrial beekeeping's imperial inheritances Quinn, Alyssa
Abstract
The migratory beekeeping industry in North America is an integral component of capitalist agriculture due to the pollination services it provides. The industry is rife with problems ranging from the difficulty of maintaining adequate honey bee populations from year to year, to the negative impacts intensified agricultural land use has on wild species. Discussions surrounding the predicaments facing honey bees often occlude historical and ongoing settler colonialism as well as the capitalist economy that drives the pursuit of economies of scale. In order to remediate the aforementioned tendencies, this thesis puts to work Stoler’s (2016) recursive analytics to weave a genealogical account of the imperial formations that inhere in contemporary industrial beekeeping, with a focus on the 1862 Morrill Act and its relationship to the modernization of apiculture. I then take Greenpeace’s “Save the Bees” campaign to task to illustrate capitalism’s subsumption of discourse. Using Shukin’s (2009) rubric of rendering, I argue that a biopolitical analysis of commercial beekeeping necessitates a reading of both symbolic and material currencies towards a more fulsome understanding of trends within the industry. My research seeks to show the entanglements between imaginative structures, power, and relationships to bees and more-than-human worlds more broadly.
Item Metadata
Title |
Rendering's recursions : industrial beekeeping's imperial inheritances
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Creator | |
Supervisor | |
Publisher |
University of British Columbia
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Date Issued |
2022
|
Description |
The migratory beekeeping industry in North America is an integral component of capitalist
agriculture due to the pollination services it provides. The industry is rife with problems ranging
from the difficulty of maintaining adequate honey bee populations from year to year, to the
negative impacts intensified agricultural land use has on wild species. Discussions surrounding
the predicaments facing honey bees often occlude historical and ongoing settler colonialism as
well as the capitalist economy that drives the pursuit of economies of scale. In order to remediate
the aforementioned tendencies, this thesis puts to work Stoler’s (2016) recursive analytics to
weave a genealogical account of the imperial formations that inhere in contemporary industrial
beekeeping, with a focus on the 1862 Morrill Act and its relationship to the modernization of
apiculture. I then take Greenpeace’s “Save the Bees” campaign to task to illustrate capitalism’s
subsumption of discourse. Using Shukin’s (2009) rubric of rendering, I argue that a biopolitical
analysis of commercial beekeeping necessitates a reading of both symbolic and material
currencies towards a more fulsome understanding of trends within the industry. My research
seeks to show the entanglements between imaginative structures, power, and relationships to
bees and more-than-human worlds more broadly.
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Genre | |
Type | |
Language |
eng
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Date Available |
2022-04-25
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Provider |
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
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Rights |
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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DOI |
10.14288/1.0413038
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URI | |
Degree | |
Program | |
Affiliation | |
Degree Grantor |
University of British Columbia
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Graduation Date |
2022-05
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Campus | |
Scholarly Level |
Graduate
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Rights URI | |
Aggregated Source Repository |
DSpace
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Item Media
Item Citations and Data
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International