In this book, Angela Stuesse offers readers much more than the title promises. As one would expect, the book analyzes the life-threatening conditions workers face in the poultry slaughterhouses of central Mississippi. Yet it also provides an important analysis of Stuesse’s experience as an activist researcher. An anthropologist trained in the University of Texas at Austin’s tradition of engaged scholarship, Stuesse moved to the Mississippi town of Forest not only to do research but also to collaborate with a workers’ center in improving the lives of laborers in chicken-processing plants. Stuesse’s discussion of her work imbues the book with a sense of purpose, and also raises pressing questions about the role of the academy in supporting scholars who tackle immigration, racism, and other urgent issues of our time.
Stuesse begins her book with a valuable historical overview of workers’ exploitation in Mississippi that contextualizes poultry work as part of a...
