The proposed project sets out to investigate labour agency and resistance among gang migrant workers involved in agricultural production, organized in Global Value Chains (GVCs), in the countryside south of the capital of Rome, Central Italy. The study of gangmastering in contemporary agri-food systems is an ever-expanding field. However, academic research, NGOs and journalistic accounts typically offer a unidimensional representation of gangmastering as a relationship of coercion imposed to vulnerable workers, and gang workers as passive victims to be rescued. 

The research will be based on a combined used of different theories to develop a more nuanced and dynamic conceptualisation of gangmastering, taking workers, their social reproduction and their agency as its starting point. Gangmastering is not just a form of domination and exploitation passively experienced by gang workers at the level of production. Gangmstering is also the combined result on the one hand of broader forces of coercion disciplining workers beyond workplace, existing in their social reproduction realms and in the whole society, and on the other of the various forms of resistance of workers that tend to remain hidden but that have significant influences on the organisation of capitalism, shaping gangmaster patterns and labour processes. Gang workers are not passive victims, they do not passively adapt to economic imperatives, rather they are active agents shaping continually their economic geographies and the way coercion over workers is re-organised by capital.