<p> Building upon an emerging literature of educational biopolitics, this dissertation develops and thinks through some concepts to explore the prevailing forms of educational life (constituted <i>b&iacute;os</i>) that schools commonly promote in the service of constituted power and, alternatively, the kinds of educational life (constituent <i>b&iacute;os</i>) that call constituted power into question and portend new possibilities and alternative arrangements of being. In considering the kinds of life that schools typically allow and disallow, this philosophical dissertation poses the following educational problem: schools have long celebrated and reproduced a limited and corrosive formulation of educational life (constituted <i>b&iacute;os</i>) while foreclosing constituent forms. Moreover, the emergent social, political and epistemological strengths of students marginalized in the configuration of constituted power&mdash;the component parts of constituent <i>b&iacute;os </i>&mdash;are routinely deemed inferior in schools and often regarded as a contaminating threat that must be eliminated. Using the concepts of constituent and constituted <i>b&iacute;os</i> as units of analysis, this study explores how progressive and critical educational approaches, such as culturally relevant teaching and resistance theory, also fail to account for and appreciate constituent forms of educational life. In order to offer a more nuanced understanding of the relation between forms of life and schools, this study offers an <i> autonomist biopolitics of education</i>. With this orientation, constituent <i> b&iacute;os</i> is recognized as the foundational and constitutive motor to which schools are constantly reacting and attempting to &ldquo;deal with.&rdquo; Such a perspective might help educators be more attuned and responsive to the constituent dimensions of social ontology.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines intersections of care and production on commercial dairy farms in southern Wisconsin where farmers and their cows must produce ever more milk to keep farms in business. The maxim, &ldquo;a well-cared for cow produces more milk,&rdquo; is common sense in the dairy worlds of Wisconsin. It invokes the notion that putting time and money into caring for cows makes financial sense, but it obfuscates how optimizing cows toward milk production goals can instead create suffering. Amidst the moral knotting of this care-production logic expressed in a plethora of technical and scientific interventions into the dairy production system, humans and cows negotiate the everyday work of making milk. This thesis traces these forms of intervention and negotiation. </p><p> Farms, I argue, are patches, crosscut by multiple discourses that shape what it means to be a farmer and what it means to be a cow. Productivist discourse, which places pounds of milk at the heart of industry goals, justifies biotechnological interventions that seek to turn cows into machines of optimal milk and calf (re)production. These interventions target particular parts of cow bodies, as mechanistic components, in order to fine-tune them toward high milk production. </p><p> This dissertation performs a figurative (dis)assembly of human and bovine lives by unfolding the worlds and discourses that emerge through partitioning and tinkering with bodily parts: rumens, genes, ovaries, udders, and senses of taste. Through this unfolding, the multiple spatiotemporalities of production and the pursuit of efficiency become visible as material ways that cow bodies are optimized. A chapter on rumens demonstrates how cows are figured as cow-athletes that must have specialized diets, geared toward speeding up metabolism and thus the production of milk. A chapter on genes evokes the speculative futures where the imaginary Supercow and its yet unrealized production capacities await. A chapter on ovaries traces the hormonal manipulation of cow bodies toward synchronous reproduction and hides the toll of high-milk production. Taste, too, is partitioned, as a sensory capacity of the palate. A chapter on taste demonstrates how cows are made into subjects of nutritional discourse through caring practice that brings cow and human senses into recursive and mutual attunement. </p><p> By following the partitioning of cows, a key discursive move in the cow-as-machine paradigm, this dissertation follows how biotechnological interventions geared toward maximizing milk (re)production contribute to reimagining life and work on Wisconsin dairy farms in the midst of significant farm restructuring toward larger herds on fewer farms. This (dis)assembly, however violent, requires practices of care in order to hold cow bodies together as efficient producers. In following the discourses and practices that unfold around bodily (dis)assembly it is also possible to excavate the forms of resistance however small and the recuperative possibilities therein.</p><p>

<p> Day laborers in the United States have increasingly become a source of labor in the informal economy due to the pressure for businesses to reduce labor costs (Gonzalez 2007; Ord&oacute;&ntilde;ez 2016; Valenzuela 2001). Day laborers provide necessary labor yet are exempt from typical workplace regulations, making them an ideal source for inexpensive labor (Theodore, Valenzuela Jr., and Mel&eacute;ndez 2009). Though day laborers are a vulnerable population, they are also united and show strength as a collective. This project is an ethnography of a grassroots organization of day laborers in Southern California that I call the Day Labor Center (DLC). I argue that migrant day laborers, despite vulnerabilities and structural inequalities, demonstrate agency and flexibility in the workplace and in their everyday lives. </p><p> Through 22 months of fieldwork, including observations, interviews, and group discussions, I present the experiences of migrant day laborers to reveal the unique contradictions they face as they navigate employment alongside broader structural boundaries that add to their precarious existence. While migrant day laborers are economically marginal, they simultaneously control their own labor in ways that other workers cannot when they set their own schedules, negotiate wages, and choose their employment conditions. Furthermore, because most day laborers are undocumented, they are a marginalized workforce, yet openly visible as available workers and active participants of the community. My fieldwork reveals that migrant workers at the DLC demonstrate &ldquo;local citizenship&rdquo; (Villazor 2010, 574) as they have become embedded into the local community and may serve as a potential model for how local community members and policymakers can offer more inclusive spaces for migrants. This research highlights the central role of day labor centers as sources of empowerment for migrant workers as they provide services, encourage collaboration and resource-sharing, and foster community. Finally, although many migrant day laborers are isolated and far from family, labor centers can foster a sense of community and empower them to create new forms of kinship and belonging. Ultimately, this research contributes to current anthropological scholarship regarding migration and labor and informs our understanding of the varied experiences and responses to vulnerabilities that migrant workers confront. </p><p>

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