‘Like yelling bomb in an airport’: bed bugs and more-than-human geographies of migrant farm worker hostels

ABSTRACT

This paper unravels the intimate and irritant more-than-human encounters in hostel accommodation used by migrant farm workers in regional Australia. These are communal places of inhabitancy that draw attention to the intersecting concerns of highly mobile populations, seasonal labour, migration politics, and the socio-material relationships that flourish within such spaces. I examine the presence of bed bugs and other nonhumans through interviews with farm workers, hostel operators and managers, and ethnographic observations, to highlight broader implications of such ‘communal’ forms of living. The communal nature of living alongside others is challenging, especially when the arrangement is for work and migration, rather than leisure, and due to a lack of affordable housing options. The paper uses a more-than-human lens to bring into dialogue the mobilities of these workers with notions of communal living, which are intrinsically tied to visa conditions and labour migration. In doing so, the paper contributes to broadening the understandings of how and where mobilities take shape, and the impacts that more-than-human agencies have on day-to-day life in communal living situations.

Resumen

Este artículo desentraña los encuentros íntimos e irritantes más-que-humanos en los albergues utilizados por los trabajadores agrícolas migrantes en Australia. Se trata de lugares comunitarios de habitabilidad que llaman la atención sobre las preocupaciones interseccionales de las poblaciones altamente móviles, el trabajo estacional, las políticas migratorias y las relaciones socio materiales que florecen dentro de dichos espacios. Examino la presencia de pulgas y otros seres no humanos a través de entrevistas con trabajadores agrícolas, operadores y administradores de albergues; y observaciones etnográficas, para resaltar implicaciones más amplias de tales formas de vida “comunales”. El documento utiliza una lente más-que-humana para dialogar entre la movilidad de estos trabajadores y las nociones de vida comunitaria, que están intrínsecamente ligadas a las condiciones de visa y a la migración laboral. Al hacerlo, el artículo contribuye a ampliar la comprensión de cómo y dónde toman forma las movilidades, y los impactos que las agencias más-que-humanas tienen en la vida cotidiana en situaciones de vida comunitaria.

Résumé

Cet article présente les intimes et irritantes rencontres plus qu’humaines dans les foyers d’hébergement où vivent les travailleurs agricoles migrants en Australie. Ce sont des endroits communautaires de résidence qui révèlent une combinaison de problèmes qui inclut les populations à forte mobilité, la main-d’œuvre saisonnière, la politique migratoire et les relations sociomatérielles qui se forment au sein de leurs espaces. J’étudie la présence des punaises de lit et d’autres créatures non humaines par le biais d’entretiens avec des travailleurs agricoles, des exploitants et des directeurs de foyers, ainsi que d’observations ethnographiques, dans le but d’illustrer les implications plus générales de ces types de vie « communautaire ». L’article se sert d’un prisme plus qu’humain pour développer un dialogue entre les mobilités de ces travailleurs et les notions de vie communautaire, qui sont étroitement liées aux conditions de visa et à la migration de main-d’œuvre. Ce faisant, il contribue à mieux comprendre comment et où les mobilités prennent forme, et les effets que les agentivités plus qu’humaines ont sur la vie quotidienne dans les situations de vie communautaire.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobilities
• communal living
• farm work
• backpackers
• irritation
• biosecurity

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• movilidades
• convivencia
• trabajo agrícola
• mochileros
• irritación
• bioseguridad

MOTS CLEFS:

• mobilités
• vie communautaire
• travail agricole
• routards
• irritation
• biosécurité

Introduction

In case you are not familiar, let me start by introducing the bed bug. They are tiny critters that hitch a ride on fabrics, bedding, and furniture, burrowing into wood, linen, mattresses, even plastic, and they cause irritation as they feed on unsuspecting, sleeping humans at night. They are ‘small, wingless insects’, about 5 mm and brown, and they ‘can live for 6 months at room temperature’ or longer in colder climates (Council knowledge network, n.d..). Bed bug populations are rising worldwide and are now regularly found in hostels, shelters, boarding houses, hotels, and other travel spaces (Liu & Pennington-Gray, 2015). Their presence is associated with low-budget accommodation, in particularly the backpacker-style hostel, migrant dormitories, or places thought to be unclean or unkept; but in fact, bed bugs take little heed of a five-star accommodation rating. As a hostel manager told me, they are ‘one of the few biting creatures in Australia that won’t kill you’ (interview notes), and although their bites are fairly banal in the grand scheme of biting insects, and do not pose a significant health risk, they are incredibly itchy and can last for days to weeks. These kinds of irritations breach human presumptions about cleanliness, shared spaces, and accommodation standards and preferences by putting nonhumans directly in our sensory attention. Attention to the mundanity of more-than-human encounters is useful in expanding understandings of the migrant experience. In this paper I use experiences of bed bugs, alongside other animate and inanimate nonhumans, to contribute to the immense body of literature on the more-than-human (e.g. Gibson et al., 2015; Krzywoszynska, 2019; O’Gorman & van Dooren, 2017; Phillips, 2013) that influence and affect human mobility and experiences. Considering the more-than-human in the context of migration brings into focus the larger migration experience, including work and mobility, modes of inhabitancy, and a sense of communality, which this paper seeks to bring into dialogue with existing literature on more-than-human geographies. The following extract from my fieldwork journal illustrates some of the tension that bed bugs elicit:

I’m following the hostel manager around as he and two employees are stripping bunk beds, changing doona covers and pillow cases. I notice that each bunk has a small, square box affixed to it, placed under the mattress. I point and ask what that is. The manager tells me: ‘that’s a bed bug pad, it attracts the female bedbugs and when they get close, or walk over it, they die’.

Intrigued, I ask what they do if they get an outbreak of bed bugs. He looks at me sternly, finishes folding the corners of the sheets on the bed, and then says slowly: ‘I just about cry. I have cried. And then I call my pest control guy. I have him on speed dial’.

I ask, ‘do you get them here much?’ And he replies, ‘Yes, often. But we get the place checked every fortnight. People bring them here, they don’t know it, but they get in their bags, clothes, even from the fabric on the bus seats. But saying “bed bugs” in a hostel is like yelling “bomb” at the airport. Everyone just freaks out’.

(fieldwork journal, October 2019)

The irony, though, is that unlike the consequences of yelling ‘bomb’ in the highly regulated space of an airport, the alarming discovery of bed bugs in a hostel usually yields very little response. There is no government regulation over bed bug ‘outbreaks’ in Australia, unlike other stringent biosecurity and pest prevention towards pesty nonhumans (Barry, 2021b; Farbotko, Maclean & Robinson, 2016; Miller, 2019; Phillips, 2013). Due to the high mobility of people coming and going in and out of a hostel, there seems to be an assumption that because of the temporary and transient nature of those who stay in hostels might be able to put up with these irritants and inconveniences. Following literature on more-than-human geographies, I suggest that by paying attention to bed bugs in hostels offers ways to consider how humans inhabit spaces alongside many others and, further, the mobile nature of communal inhabitancy that is made and unmade by more-than-humans¹.

In Australia (and elsewhere), hostels are spaces that are commonly used as budget accommodation for tourists, students, and migrant workforces. Hostels in Australian regional areas are closely tied to seasonal agricultural work, and often the accommodation provisions for farm workers are organized by the employers (Barry, 2021b; Stead, 2021). Living alongside others in close proximity is challenging, especially when this living arrangement is for work rather than leisure, or due to lack of alternative affordable housing options. The communal nature of hostels often leads to frictions amongst inhabitants, as they share dormitory rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, and laundry areas (Barry & Iaquinto, 2023). But the assumptions of a functional hostel design can also be found in other accommodation provisions, such as boarding houses, temporary shelters, ad-hoc immigration detention, and more (see Burridge, 2020; Fregonese & Ramadan, 2015). Worker hostels and accommodation have a long history as carceral spaces that segregate migrants from society (Allina, 2018; Holmes, 2013; Nieftagodien, 2017). Therefore, paying attention to pesky nonhumans who live alongside humans in these communal spaces, raises different questions about the role of ‘basic’ accommodation provisions and labour mobilities of migrants. The humble bed bug is a good example of how the socio-material fabric of a place encompasses more-than-human geographies that alter how such communal spaces are inhabited and endured in day-to-day life.

In this paper I unravel the intimate (and irritant) more-than-human encounters that flourish in farm worker hostels. I draw on interviews with farm workers on temporary visas, hostel operators and managers, and ethnographic observations within hostels during 2019 and 2022. The paper uses a more-than-human lens to bring into dialogue the mobilities of these workers with notions of communal living. After a quick tour through literature on pests and more-than-humans, a brief overview of the methods and context for this study is given. The remaining sections unfold around two main themes: First, an overview of bed bugs and the encounters humans have with them in hostels is given, highlighting the more-than-human aspects. Second, the space of the hostel as a communal form of inhabitancy extends ideas of the more-than-human relations that bed bugs manifest, but through the broader context of accommodation for migrant workers. The paper concludes by highlighting how these geographies of mobility discussed in this paper broaden our understandings of how and where mobilities take shape, even in seemingly immobile situations, and who is on the move alongside us.

Living communally (with more-than-humans)

Bed bugs are one of the many critters that shift and move with humans, leaving traces and impressions on our all-too-human assumptions about how we inhabit a place. There has been a wealth of geographical literature around pests and biosecurity, especially in the context of farming and invasive species (e.g. Benali & Ren, 2019; Farbotko, Maclean & Robinson, 2016; Miller, 2019; O’Gorman & van Dooren, 2017; Phillips, 2013). Studies of biosecurity highlight the ontological challenges that arise from trying to separate humans from nonhumans, or more broadly, nature from culture (e.g. Antonsich, 2021; Donaldson & Wood, 2004; Krzywoszynska, 2019). Confusion as to who belongs in a situation is often shaped by ‘multiple overlapping worldviews’ (Donaldson & Wood, 2004, p. 374) and this has a profound influence over their mobility (Barry, 2021a). Importantly, O’Gorman and van Dooren describe pests as an ‘ontological threat’ (2017, p. 82), but they note that this focus in scholarship should not be a ‘“love in” with pests … but rather to mark an opening into an ongoing questioning of the larger systems – philosophical, ecological, economic, cultural – that render some forms of life pestiferous in the first place’ (2017, p. 83). Pests, as one form of more-than-human relationship, raises questions about what kinds of lives we care for and are attentive to (Krzywoszynska, 2019), and how we prioritize and privilege living with certain nonhumans as opposed to others.

As the itchy bite of a bed bug reveals, some nonhumans that accompany human activity are not always desirable, comfortable, or harmonious to live alongside. Phillips describes in the context of fruit flies – an agricultural pest, attention to the more-than-human highlights ‘encounters of indifference and conflict’ (2013, p. 1683), rather than rigid definitions or boundaries between human and nonhuman. Pests remind us that ‘who is welcome and who is not’ is a ‘fixed and permanent’ assumption (O’Gorman & van Dooren, 2017, p. 83), but one that is deep-rooted in anthropocentric and colonizing practices (Antonsich, 2021). However, understanding how humans cope with these kinds of irritants, inconveniences, or even declared biosecurity threats, is a more-than-human concern that involves attention to the ‘everyday performance’ (Miller, 2019, p. 351) of how humans attempt to eliminate or border these unwanted co-habitants.

Part of learning to live in more-than-human ways is to appreciate the first-hand ‘experiential knowledge’ of certain situations that entangle humans with perhaps undesirable nonhumans, as Farbotko, Maclean and Robinson suggest (2016, p. 780). Similarly, Benali and Ren’s study of volunteer tourist’s encounters with lice emphasizes how a focus on the nonhuman, as the starting point, unravels very different stories about how ‘experiences and subjectivities are enacted as socio-material processes’ (2019, p. 240), especially when it comes to spaces of inhabitancy. Although these might be irritating and uncomfortable, lice or bed bugs are pests that are not a critical threat to human life, yet our alarm and reaction to their discovery can be unsettling. Feelings of discomfort, irritation, and unease have captivated geographers in work on mobility and the mundanity of daily life, teasing out the embodied encounters with a range of spaces, materials, and politics (e.g. Bissell, 2009; Brighenti & Pavoni, 2019; Löfgren, 2008; Price et al., 2020). But specific types of nonhumans, something pesky such as a bed bug, provokes and raises the level of discomfort when considering how humans move, live, and share space with others. When comfort becomes ‘zoned’, which Price, McNally and Crang observe (2020, p. 6), that is, beyond one’s ‘comfort zone’, these ‘feelings, doings, and makings’ of what was previously considered comfortable, inhabitable space become ‘dangerous’. Feelings of ‘conviviality, generosity and empowered bodily experiences’ become ‘flattened’ (Price et al., 2020, p. 6), creating divisions through interactions. Communal living, in this sense, is always in-process and unpredictable, like a carefully balancing act on the edge of one’s comfort zone, an inherently human subjectivity.

If we are to consider how a space comes to be communal or shared, then, following Alaimo (2010, p. 2), I suggest this requires a broader consideration of ‘a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions’. And as Krzywoszynska posits, these ethical relations and maintenance of careful, ‘good worlds’ for some ‘inevitably encroaches on the good world or good life of some others’ (2019, p. 665). Here, the anthropocentric hierarchies cannot be shied away from, but as O’Gorman and van Dooren remind us, identifying such ‘uncomfortable presences’ (2017, p. 82) assists in understanding how worlds are constantly made and shared with others. A key point is that these studies of the more-than-human argue that to ‘expand the range of actors contributing to the collaborative shaping’ of experiences (Benali & Ren 2019, p. 243), this alters the types of knowledges and concerns that come to co-constitute and shape such communal situations.

Any discussion of living with others, especially in constrictive conditions such as in low-budget or shared accommodation, needs to recognize that human power hierarchies and politics play a key role too. The ‘working hostel’, used in Australia almost exclusively for farm workers who are on temporary visas, is itself a conglomeration of nonhuman agencies that impose on the human inhabitants: migration politics, visa conditions, material provisions, regional or rural geographies, access to mobility, the type and duration of farm work; these are just some of the broader considerations at play of how people inhabit hostels (see Barry, 2021b). Working hostels are part of the low-budget housing and accommodation provisions that largely serve migrant workforces, but the hostel model – of communal, dormitory rooms – is also widely used in crisis accommodation and shelters, and ad-hoc immigration detention in motels or hotels (e.g. Burridge, 2020; Ubayasiri, 2021). Hostels have a long history of housing migrants as a racialized tool of containing migrant workforces. For instance, Allina’s (2018) writing on Mozambican youths living in East Germany hostels during the 1980s shows how accommodation was used as a mechanism for cultural induction as well as social control over migrants. Holmes (2013) extensive ethnography of farm worker accommodation in the United States reveals how accommodation provisions are allocated by racial hierarchies of Indigeneity and ethnicity amongst migrants from Mexico. In farm worker accommodation, basic shelter and provisions, as Holmes outlines, is always in dialogue with pests, weather, insecticides, and seasonal irritants that impress upon the human inhabitants. In the Australian historical context, hostels were used to house post-war migrants, largely from Europe, and were widely known as inferior facilities and cleanliness (e.g. Agutter & Ankeny, 2016; O’Hanlon, 2016). The migrant working hostel is a particular space that serves farming communities in regional Australia, which at once enables a place of residence for a workforce, but also confines and immobilizes many who have very few options of alternative accommodation (Barry, 2021; Barry & Iaquinto, 2023).

The commonalities across these examples are clear: when used to primarily house migrants, the hostel operates to curtail movement, to limit visitation and contact beyond the migrant community in the hostel, and to surveil and control with ‘house rules’, and for many migrant workers there are usually limited opportunities for accommodation choice. This is often done through sub-standard provisions and conditions enabled by nonhuman factors that force inhabitants to be impinged by others: dirt, visas, CCTV, pests, and more. By examining the shared living quarters through the nonhuman, this unfolds ‘subjectivities beyond the human-centric confines’ (Benali & Ren 2019, p. 240–241) that inform and shape the assumed relationships and hierarchies in situation. My point here is that the histories of migrant hostels are always embedded in a fabric of more-than-human concerns that are used to control and coerce human behaviour.

While of course not all contemporary hostels are bad places, and many do important, supportive work, this long history of the migrant hostel needs to be acknowledged. These kinds of constrictive, contained spaces, which, when designed for people who are in more tentative migration conditions (temporary visa holders, in particular), cannot be separated from carceral histories and the associations with cramped, confined spatial designs (see Peters & Turner, 2018; Walters & Lüthi, 2016) that reinforce power hierarchies and politics. At the same time, working hostels in Australia are, generally, in the public perception a bit grimy and dirty, this is less because they house ‘migrants’, and more that they are considered as part of a network of low-budget accommodation, used by low-class, working travellers – Australian locals, too. This includes hostels, budget motels, campgrounds, outback pubs, etc. Communal living, in this sense, should not be by default a term associated with an idyllic or aspirational way of living with less, or tourism cultures, or sharing resources for a prosperous and enclosed community. But rather, hostels are part of the patchwork of alternative forms of accommodation that people with little wealth, employment options, visa options, or socio-cultural support networks must endure.

Inside the hostel, which usually houses from anywhere from 20 to 150+ people at a time, communal facilities and spaces are shared between (human) residents. There is considerable evidence of sub-standard accommodation provisions in migrant hostels and dormitory-style accommodation (Caxaj & Weiler, 2022; Ratcliffe, 2020), which impacts on a person’s mobility, health, and livelihood. As recent studies have advocated, it is crucial to considering the working hostels as part of broader migration trends (Barry & Iaquinto, 2023; Nagai et al., 2018), and their relationship to the geopolitics of increasing temporary and precarious migrant labour forces (Barry et al., 2020). Widespread exploitation, underpayment, and poor living and working conditions (Campbell et al., 2019; Fair Work Ombudsman, 2016), and the increasing reliance on agricultural labour from migration schemes, means that this kind of budget accommodation in regional places is growing, and working hostels play a significant role in how people on temporary visas employed in farm work endure their time in Australia.

The communal nature of hostels has also been theorized by many in tourism, with an emphasis on the shared spaces and social relations that emerge in such situations (e.g. Barry & Iaquinto, 2023; O’Regan, 2010). But the tendency to focus on the (overall positive) social and cultural aspects of hostelling tends to prioritize the human, and neglect the role of the spatial and material design of the accommodation, the broader economic or environmental influences on how the hostel is managed and run, and the many other nonhuman actors that are entwined in the presence of the hostel. Considering a hostel as a communal form of inhabitancy, therefore, offers other questions as to who else we are living with. As O’Gorman and van Dooren reflect, attending to the more-than-human, in particularly those ‘pest’ categories, offers ‘other ways of valuing and inhabiting agricultural landscapes’ (2017, 83). Literature on more-than-human encounters in the home offers us a way to consider the vibrancy of daily life and the influence nonhuman materials have over humans (e.g. Alam et al., 2020; Dowling et al., 2017; Ratnam & Drozdzewski, 2020). But looking at nonhumans that irritate in intimate ways – such as the bed bug that breaches comfortable thresholds of one’s body, clothing, bedding – reveals far more ‘intimate entanglements’ (Phillips, 2013, p. 1680) with pesky critters. When nonhumans ‘make their uncomfortable presence felt and demand response’ (O’Gorman & van Dooren, 2017, p. 82), how does this complicate the already existing discomforts that a hostel environment already entails?

Due to the nature of the seasonal farm work and close living quarters, farm workers share space with other nonhumans too: bed bugs, mosquitoes, luggage, vegetables, dirt, insecticides, work boots, and more. As the following two sections will describe, something as inconvenient and overlooked as the bed bug draws attention to the assumed boundaries of how humans inhabit a place, and the thresholds of comfort and irritation that can be so easily crossed.

Methods and context

This paper draws from two studies on the experiences of people on temporary visas who are engaged in farm work in regional Queensland, Australia. The first study, a pilot project that ran from 2019, compiled two months of ethnographic observations and interviews (n = 68) with a range of temporary visa holders, including people on the Working Holiday Maker visa (WHM),[1] the Seasonal Worker Programme (for Pacific Island nations), international students, and several people without a current visa or residence permit. In the current study, which is a three-year project (commenced April 2022), interviews with five hostel operators are included in this paper’s empirical data. Both the pilot and current study are focused on the town of Bundaberg, an agricultural hub in Queensland, Australia. Fieldwork was undertaken on the unceded lands of the Taribelang and Bunda peoples, the Indigenous custodians of the land where Bundaberg is situated. The region has a long history of migrant labour, and slavery, which has served to build a strong and significant horticultural sector, stretching back to when settlers colonized the continent. Farm-based accommodation and hostels for workers have been a permanent, yet largely overlooked, part of this regional area for decades (Barry, 2021b, 2022).

The interviews with farm workers were conducted inside hostels where they were living, during periods of fieldwork where I was also staying as a guest inside of a hostel, and some short follow-up day visits by myself and research assistants. It is important to note that the hostels who opened their doors and let me inside for accommodation, interviews, and fieldwork observations were all of a high standard, but rumours and information of other less-than-desirable hostels travels fast in regional places. Informed consent was obtained before any interviews or observation was undertaken (University ethics Ref No: 2022/104), and all participants and hostel names have been de-identified. The interview excerpts drawn on in this paper were conducted by myself, a mid-30s, white, Australian cis-female, and additional interviews were conducted by two research assistants (an early 20s, white, Australian-born male, and an early 40s, Nepalese male). Interviews were conducted in English, recorded as audio, semi-structured and analysed thematically. A variety of nationalities are captured, although the Working Holiday Makers dominate the interview data – in particular, people from Ireland (n = 10), United Kingdom (n = 7), and Germany (n = 7). Additional nationalities of farm worker participants include: Nepalese, Sweden, South Korea, Tonga, Fiji, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, United States of America, Argentina, Belgium, India, and several participants chose not to state their nationality.

Arranging a time with participants to conduct the formal recorded interview was often difficult, as many informal conversations would emerge at unanticipated times. It was important that the research design included ‘being in the place(s) of our research’ (Ratnam, 2019, p. 19), as the space of the hostel and its socio-material influence was not a backdrop to the interviews but rather central in the agency of the hostel’s atmosphere that I was attempting to understand. Furthermore, due to the early morning starts of the farm work, and the exhausting nature of such manual work, many interviews took place in haphazard moments, while other chores and daily activities were being undertake. For instance, while someone was cooking dinner, washing the dishes, tidying up their bunk bed and belongings, hanging their laundry on the line, or even waiting in line for the communal showers. These are the ‘multisensoriality’ moments of research that brings context to encounters between ‘people and the physical environment’ (Pink, 2009, p. 44), and I would argue, furthers the chances for encounters in a more-than-human manner. The interviews and my observations therefore capture moments that ‘seem to be everyday, uneventful, things’, but, like Crouch’s (2003) deliberations on observing the mundane, in the process of my writing up of these notes, ‘components of the performative are realized in a heightened awareness of hyper-reflexivity’ (2003, p. 1950). That is to say, while I was seeking out the encounters with nonhumans that arise in the everyday routines of the hostel space, in all its ‘sensory, multifarious glory’ of the everyday (Hall & Holmes, 2020, p. 3), I am conscious that my presence and keen observation of such shared spaces, inevitably renders these mundane encounters as perhaps slightly more animate. It is this contention with scale, in which the ‘close, localized, observable’ (Hall & Holmes, 2020, p. 2) becomes a convenient source of attention and encounters with the more-than-human.

Bed bugs – an unassuming travel companion and roommate

Bed bugs are mobile critters. Travellers pick them up and bring them home, they hitch a ride on luggage, bedding, and furniture (Department of Health and Aging, 2013), even settling in for the ride on the interior fabrics of aircraft, trains, and coaches (Haiken, 2011). A common assumption is that the bed bug exists only in poorly cleaned accommodation or crowded, cramped dormitories. But they are widespread, particularly in North America and Asia, and in Australia populations are on the rise (Department of Health and Aging, 2013). Indeed, as Doggett et al. describe, bed bugs ‘virtually disappeared has made an astonishing come back’ in the early 2000s on a worldwide scale (2011, p. 97).

In Australia there are two types of bed bugs: ‘the common bed bug, Cimex lectularius, and the tropical bed bug, Cimex hemipterus’ (Council knowledge network, n.d..), although after asking around hostel managers, no one could tell the difference. Their insignificance in scale is overshadowed by the potency to irritate, and importantly, they only feed on humans.

Bed bugs are mainly nocturnal, resting during the day and completing most of their feeding at night. Warmth and the presence of carbon dioxide (which humans breathe out) attracts these insects. Bed bugs will feed every five to ten days but may survive for several months without a blood feed. (Health Victoria, 2021)

Although the method of removing bed bugs from personal belongings is relatively easy enough – wash clothing and fabrics in ‘hot water and dry it on the hot cycle of the clothes drier, or place delicate materials in the freezer for at least 48 hours’ (Department of Health and Aging, 2013, p. 15) – removing them from furniture, especially wooden items or mattresses, is an ongoing battle. Bed bugs have developed a resistance to insecticides, and to keep them at bay requires a regularly rotating cocktail of chemicals provided by professional pest inspectors. Speaking with five hostel operators, three said they had a pest inspector ‘on speed dial’, requiring at least a monthly inspection and treatment of the bunk beds and other furniture.

Bed bugs keep us humans in close quarters. They bury in under a person’s clothing, heading towards crevices and warmth, so areas like the armpits, groin, and neck. Their signature mark, of several bites in a trio or quartet line, makes their irritations felt and visible, even though their miniscule size and refrain from daylight largely renders their presence invisible to the average eye. Before I embarked on this ethnographic studying, of staying in hostels, I had been lucky in my youthful backpacking adventures to never directly encounter bed bugs. But during fieldwork in 2019, I had a close call:

I woke up early one morning, before dawn, covered in outrageously itchy bites. I leaped out of the bunkbed. Everyone heard me, and got out of their beds, someone switched on the light, all hovering around my bunk, but taking care not to get too close. After inspection of my blankets, sheets, and pulling back to see the mattress itself, everyone in the dorm reassured me it was mozzie bites, not bed bugs. I glanced at the open window nearby. ‘How do you know?’, I desperately asked. ‘Well, the bites are only on the exposed parts of you – your legs and arms. If it was bed bugs, they get up under your clothes, in your armpits, even your … um, crotch area’, one person replied. We all had a laugh and the relief washed over me. A close call, but I felt embarrassed that I’d scared everyone out of bed early on the weekend, on their precious day off and a chance to sleep in. (fieldwork journal, August 2019)

With multiple bites and ongoing encounters with bed bugs, several farm workers that I interviewed said they had to seek medical treatment for inflammation, skin infections (from scratching so much), and one person had said they’d suffered a moderate allergic reaction from bed bug bites. A hostel operator told me how several times she had taken in workers from a neighbouring hostel, who had a poor reputation for bed bugs, and had to ‘basically bin all their belongings, and take them up to the after-hours doctors, they had that many bites, they looked like they had the plague’ (Hostel Operator, interview).

Speaking with a backpacker from the US, who was at the time managing a hostel, his thoughts on bed bugs surprised me:

I have a lot of thoughts on bed bugs. They’re not really a problem. Yes, it’s concerning, because you don’t want insects in your bed, right? Yes, they leave bite marks. But they’re much less nefarious than a mosquito. They don’t generally cause health problems. We do a lot – all [the hostels] I’ve been at, they do a lot to prevent bed bugs, and rightly so. It just kind of is seen as a barometer for cleanliness in a lot of people’s eyes. (Hostel manager, interview)

I ask whether his perspective has changed since being a hostel manager, rather than a worker, and he replied:

I don’t understand why it’s ‘red alert’ every time someone finds them in their beds, because, especially if they find them here, in this hostel, it’s because they’ve brought them here, 100% of the time. … The issue is the travellers come in and out, they carry all sorts of things with them. That’s not something you can prevent, but you can try to stem the flow or limit it the minute it happens. … It’s not an ‘invasion’ or ‘infestation’, it’s just a bug that got into your linen and is trying to make a home. But no one is going to freak out if they saw an ant walking across this table. But if it was a bed bug, they would light a match and try to burn the house down. (Hostel manager, interview)

This kind of reaction and alarm targeted to one specific nonhuman, rather than others, is suggestive of a specific social relationship that we have with bed bugs. Despite their persistence and their hardy, adaptive nature, bed bugs are not regulated or monitored in Australia. While there are working groups (see Doggett et al., 2011), it is largely left up to the accommodation providers to maintain and battle the infestations. Hefty pest control expenses, constant checking, and even some hostels ‘screen’ people’s belongings when they arrive, washing and tumble drying all residents clothing and fabrics, as a hostel operator explained to me. Another hostel operator said that the screening on arrival, plus the washing and drying ‘takes a few hours when people arrive, but then we know we won’t have to call up the pest guy, saves a lot of time and money in the long run’ (Hostel operator, interview). Even with regular, unannounced inspections from the local government council checking accommodation provisions, several hostels expressed their dismay that council compliance checks do not actually check for bed bugs.

Nonhumans in the hostel

Across most interviews, people were attentive to animate types of nonhumans. The most notable was the bed bugs, which was a common fear. The alarm that people had, from even the mere mention of bed bugs, was palatable. Yet out of all of the interviews, only 8 people had been bitten by bed bugs themselves, but everyone was aware and vigilant of them. Many had had discovered them in hostels elsewhere, or been in a room where an ‘outbreak’ had occurred. One British male farm worker described a hostel he’d stayed at for only a few weeks as ‘the conditions that you live in are so bad. The hostel and beds were just ridden with bed bugs, everywhere’. He showed me small marks on his arms, remnants of the bed bug bites from a few months previous. I asked why he had stayed there for several weeks, if he was getting bitten. He replied ‘well, they gave me work, and I was running out of visa time, so I had to stay’ (UK male WHM). Rumours about other hostels in the Bundaberg area also prevailed, with people telling me things like, ‘You know about the backpackers hostel down the road? I heard they have bed bugs throughout. It’s very dirty there’ (South Korean female WHM). Or: ‘There’s so much dirt at that hostel, you know that there’s just got to be bed bugs too. I didn’t see any while I was there, but my friend said she did. They had cockroaches everywhere too’ (UK female WHM).

Attention to other kinds of creatures was something I observed first-hand: Bottles of mosquito-repellent were placed at-the-ready in most dorm rooms, and my false-alarm bed bug bites taught me that insect repellent was a close companion in the constantly opening and closing doors due to hostel traffic. Mosquitoes and midges can be rife at dusk in this sub-tropical region, especially after rainy periods. During an interview, we were sitting at a dining table in the hostel, when the ‘hostel mouse’ was seen skittling along the floor, under everyone’s feet. Mid-conversation, everyone leaps up from their chairs, and the three women I was interviewing all shriek. Another person appears from the nearby dorm room, and yells: ‘I SAW IT! It ran down the hall into the KITCHEN!’. I see one of them visibly shudder. The next morning, the hostel manager says reluctantly, as he is setting a mousetrap, ‘We like the hostel mouse, joke that it is a pet’.

Farm work, too, is full of pesty nonhumans: swarming wasps and bees in trees that people are pruning or harvesting, flies and larvae in the produce they are sorting, and the mouldy surfaces and bacteria on overripe fruits and vegetables is quite a sight (and smell) too, albeit at a slower pace. Other types of encounters, with less animate nonhumans, were prominent in interviews as people reflected on their current farm employment. Different types of work with various crops, soil, and chemicals were reflected on, especially in the younger workers took on new farm jobs in unfamiliar tasks. Dirt and dust from farm work pervades the interiors of working hostels, spreading throughout as an uninvited guest. An Irish WHM explained to me the ‘dust’ from her current job on a sweet potato farm infiltrates her clothing and skin:

You get covered in sweet potato dust, I didn’t even know they had ‘dust’ until I started this. So you’ll come in after work and look in the mirror, and just be like, ‘oh my god, I’m so tanned’, but you’re not. It’s bright orange [laughs] You get filthy! You might see a few people walking around here, yeah, you get absolutely covered in dust. (Irish female WHM)

Later I asked the hostel operator about the dust, and he told me that they try to group rooms of potato workers together, as the dirt from the red soils of Bundaberg, even after showering, easily lingers on skin and in hair, so it stains people’s clothing. Every hostel I visited had strict rules (and signage) about leaving work boots and muddy, dusty clothing outside before entering. One hostel has a small change room near the back door, where coats, wet weather gear, and boots are all stored to prevent the signature red dust drifting in and around the building.

Less tangible nonhuman agencies were present too. In particular, the scent of produce that people were handling in their work. During an interview a participant was explaining to me the pungent smell of capsicums that she is sorting and packing in her job, and how she can no longer stomach eating them. ‘That smell, it lingers for days. It’s hard to shake. I guess it’s the smell of the acid? … I come home smelling of them’ (interview, nationality not disclosed). Another person in the hostel overheard the conversation and comes over to us, and jokingly boasts that he reckons he can sniff out what type of farm other workers are at, even after their evening shower. He walks up to the participant I am currently interviewing, sniffs her hair, and says: ‘Capsicums. That one is easy’, and walks off, we all laugh.

The communal design of a hostel’s interior also provides avenues for unexpected encounters with nonhumans. Several times I witnessed people adding too much washing detergent to the kitchen sink, so that bubbles spilt over the benches and out onto the floor. One evening, as people were coming home from work walked past, some would ignore the mess of oozing bubbles, others gleefully staring. One guy, still in his muddy, high-vis work clothes, grabbed a handful of bubbly detergent oozing on the floor as he walked past, threw the handful of foam up in the air above his head, and started dancing. Another worker behind him walks in, joins the dance, and grabs more foam, throwing it around. ‘Silent disco!’ one of them yells as they dance, covered in washing up detergent bubbles, out the door and down the hallway. While these are mostly playful situations that I’ve recounted, it is important to note my observation and digestion of these interactions as an outsider who does not live in communal hostelling accommodation. There are also many observations I noted of long periods of silence, palpable tension, bickering and fighting in the hallways, and aversion to other people that unfold in the daily rhythm of the hostel. The small confines of one’s bunk bed space, for instance, is often cordoned off with bedsheets and blankets, hung in cubby-like attempts to blanked off other people. Mosquito nets too are draped over windows or bunk bed frames, and arguments over the position of pedestal fans at night-time, during the warmer months, is rife. In these less cheerful instances, the communal nature feels oppressive, of not only having to negotiate the many other residents in the dormitory room (see Barry & Iaquinto, 2023), but to battle of possible infestations from bed bugs, mosquitoes, and more, who are all encroaching on one’s comfort zone.

Discussion

When we ‘import’ (Phillips 2013, p. 1682) unwanted nonhumans, such as lice, bed bugs, mites, or other irritating pests, our inattention to ‘insect bodies, movements, and preferences’ (p. 1682) often surprises and irritates us. Moments of encounter, no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable, startle us into more-than-human reconfigurations of inhabitancy. Even just a whisper of a bed bug outbreak, without the confirmed presence of the nonhumans themselves, is enough to provoke drastic action, to want to ‘light a match and try to burn the house down’, as a hostel operator described. But these ‘feelings of anxiety, hysteria and aversion’ (Benali & Ren 2019, p. 243) when we encounter nonhumans can be important moments that transform a situation. Rather than seeing these moments as a ‘clash between delimited and pre-defined entities or subject positions’ (Benali & Ren, 2019, p. 243), instead, it raises questions as to the standards of communal living, the provisions and requirements for what makes sharing space comfortable. Sure, no one wants to endure dozens of bites in the middle of the night, but this says less about an individual’s responsibility or capability of preventing such an event taking place, and more about the shared nature of the accommodation arrangements.

During fieldwork I quickly learnt from the other residents a type of hyper-vigilance to more-than-humans. It is not quite anxiety, but clearly an alertness to the fact that one is always surrounded by many others, be those human or nonhuman. The arrangement of the working hostel, where people are all engaged in farm work, living there for months on end, means that the sense of sharing space with many others is a fact of life. Further, as the interviews that spoke about the types of materials they were engaged with in their farm work – capsicums, dust, dirt, just to name a few – indicate that the less animate and lively nonhumans also become enrolled in the day-to-day rhythms of the hostel community. But even in these more trivial instances – of smelling of capsicums or being covered in insect repellent – there are still power hierarchies at play that influence the migration experience. Even through a more-than-human lens, migration politics and vulnerability become evident. For instance, in Holmes’ writing on migrant farm workers in the United States, he reflects that ‘the physical dirt from the labour of the indigenous pickers had become symbolically linked with their character’ (2013, p. 86). Their ‘gruelling conditions in which they work’ (Holmes, 2013, p. 102) and their squalid living quarters, reproduce structural oppression and segregation that is inbuilt to the situation by government policies, migration practices, and the global food supply chain (p. 70). While this example is extreme in comparison to the Australian context, it emphasizes that it is not the migrant workers themselves that attract such distrust, disgust, and vulnerability, but rather a larger assemblage of more-than-human actors which produce these migrant stereotypes. As Krzywoszynska describes, these types of attentiveness to more-than-human worlds are often positive and appreciated in literature ‘for their resulting transformation’ (2019, p. 662). But how such ‘attentiveness may arise, and what work attentiveness may be able to do as a catalyst for and conduit of more-than-human ethics’ (2019, p. 662), raises questions about how to balance anthropocentric needs and comforts with that of other less valued, more irritating, forms of nonhuman life, such as the bed bug. This line of thinking, however, is useful in considering the nature of farm worker hostels, and the types of accommodation provisions that make up such communal spaces, which are assumed to be adequate for low-paid (and supposedly unskilled) forms of migrant labour.

While the dedicated and compassionate hostel operators take care in carrying out regular checks and pest treatment, such incidents and outbreaks draw attention to the broader social and political orchestration of how and why migrant workforces are so mobile and condemned to communal hostel accommodation in the first place. In an Australian government inquiry into the Working Holiday Maker visa, which has stringent regional work requirements in order to be eligible for a second or third-year visa, it found that the architecture of the visa program relied upon the hostel industry to facilitate regional and rural labour flows (Fair Work Ombudsmen, 2016). When an industry is reliant upon communal living arrangements as a key facilitator for its labour sources, the assumption that shared accommodation is adequate and should be put up with. The risks of ‘outbreaks’, as we have seen in the coronavirus pandemic, is a valid concern for people in shared accommodation. There is ample evidence that communal hostelling accommodation for migrant workforces is not sustainable, and worse, is often dangerous to health and livelihoods (e.g. Barry & Iaquinto, 2023; Barry et al., 2020; Caxaj & Weiler, 2022). Further, it is important to note that people on temporary visas who are employed in farm work are willing to put up with such inconveniences, due to concerns over racism, exploitation, or visa status (e.g. Campbell et al., 2019). Workers often have little choice in their accommodation, as is part of a larger picture of racism where farm workers in Australia are often treated differently according to nationality, ethnicity, or visa status (see Barry, 2021b).

The close quarters of hostel living and the ‘dirty’ nature of farm work means that workers expect to come into contact with such irritants. As I found in the interviews, most of the participants expected to directly encounter bed bugs in hostels during their time working on farms. And, in the nature of their farm work, which was often an unfamiliar industry and skillset for these workers, dust, dirt, mud, chemicals, and more, were novel and surprising nonhuman actors that circulated in these communal spaces. In this way, thinking about these shared environments as ‘trans-corporeal’, which, following Alaimo’s description, ‘insists that the human is always the very stuff of the messy, contingent, emergent mix of the material world’ (2010, p. 11). Considering communal inhabitancy practices through the more-than-human urges us to ask different questions about thresholds of comfort, health, safety, and rights to space – not just the assumed functionality or economy of such arrangements.

While an outbreak of something like bed bugs might, momentarily, feel like someone’s planted a bomb in the hostel, and everyone scatters, screaming, itching, in the middle of the night – it is largely left to the individuals to put up with it, to grin and bear the sub-standard confines of these communal accommodation provisions. Such dramatic manifestations of more-than-human encounters are part-and-parcel of hostel life. They cannot be easily eradicated or separated from human activity when people are living in communal spaces. Although the hostels I spent time in were certainly not dirty, and were welcoming and transparent in my inquiries and observations, they do have a significant task of keeping the place up to standard in terms of health and safety and cleanliness. The high volume of inhabitants (up to 150 people), in combination with an ongoing cycle of shift work, and the residue of their working day infused into residents’ clothes, boots, and skin as they return home to the hostel, impacts the ease of upholding cleanliness and maintenance of such communal spaces. These materialities within the hostel exacerbate existing frictions between residents (as I have shown elsewhere, see Barry & Iaquinto, 2023), and so any kinds of irritating nonhumans add to the already complex socio-material assemblage of the hostel.

That said, there are plenty other hostels whose reputations are terrible, who do have rampant bed bug infestations, and many interviews described and recounted such places. Communal hostelling accommodation does have a long legacy of being sub-standard, with poor provisions for communal spaces and facilities (Barry, 2021b; Campbell et al., 2019; Petrou & Connell, 2018; Stead, 2021), which would no doubt impinge considerably on vulnerable populations who live there. These issues are not exclusive to Australian farm worker hostels, but rather are a global concern of how migrant labour is often exploited and ignored (Caxaj & Weiler, 2022; Holmes, 2013; Seungyun Lee et al., 2022). In this sense, understanding the way that more-than-humans irritate and alter even the better housing and accommodation conditions, can shed light on broader changes needed for an industry built upon migration schemes that needs considerable more attention, regulation, and inquiry.

Conclusion

More-than-humans irritate and push boundaries of the geographies that we inhabit. The most striking fact about the bed bug is that ‘humans are their only hosts’ (Department of Health and Aging, 2013, p. 14), making a bed bug’s mobility and life trajectory intimately tied to our all-too-human ways of inhabiting a place. Like many nonhumans, the persistence of bed bugs has evolved and adapted around anthropogenic changes, as pesticides, chemicals, the spatial and social ways of living together have encouraged the flourishing of pest populations. Mobility – and importantly, immobility – is key here in how modes of inhabiting a place, alongside others, can be better understood. Not only are humans far more mobile than ever before (Urry, 2016), but so too are the things we carry with us and live alongside.

By examining bed bugs and their presence (or even merely the rumours of them) in migrant farm worker hostels, in this paper I have tied together concerns about mobility, migration, and the geographies that these mundane, everyday acts of living communally produce. Considering these relationships through a more-than-human lens, the hostel can be understood as a space that engineers social and material agencies that produce particular intimacies and irritants for inhabitants. For people on temporary visas who live in working hostels, better understandings are needed in scholarship and practice around notions of comfort, belonging, and having any sense of agency in one’s accommodation, let alone how to foster a sense of home for these mobile populations. Communal living, in this sense, is always mobile and unpredictable, carefully balanced on the edges of one’s comfort zone. But for migrant farm workers, who’s employment and accommodation are often entwined due to visa conditions (Barry & Iaquinto, 2023; Petrou & Connell, 2018; Stead, 2021), there is little agency that an individual can take in combatting or adapting to such inconvenient and irritating places of dwelling.

The pandemic restrictions impacted significantly on migrant populations worldwide, as attention turned to their living conditions and the inadequate provisions for outbreaks in cramped or shared accommodation (Barry et al., 2020; Seungyun Lee et al., 2022). Yet there has been little change, even in Australia, a wealthy nation that had such a successful mitigation of the first years of the pandemic. Broader changes are needed that take into consideration how it is to experience living alongside others, and the constraints and confinement that certain situations of inhabitancy – such as those contexts where work dictates how and where one lives – need far more nuanced understanding of how people cope, endure, and adapt. Considering ‘movements across bodies … opens up a space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors’ (Alaimo, 2010, p. 2). These are more-than-human negotiations that are always at work, although for those of us who have the luxury not to be in such confined, communal accommodations, are perhaps less obvious in how they manifest in our daily lives. But there are other sensitivities at play, as the myth or presence of a bed bug (and many other pests and nonhumans) illustrates, which influence one’s daily routines, future migration trajectories, and practices of dwelling alongside others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (project number: DE220100394) funded by the Australian Government.

Notes

1. The Working Holiday Maker visa (subclasses 417 & 462) has been a staple source of farm labour in Australia since the emergence in the 1970s. Prior to the pandemic, 100,000+ WHMs would enter Australia each year. The WHM visa is now open to 47 nationalities, people aged 18–30 (some nations up to 35yo). To extend their visa time, WHMs can complete an additional three months of specified work in regional areas for a second-year visa (usually farm work, but also in construction, mining, and tourism in rural areas), or an extra six months for a third-year visa.