Today we look at how logistical codes and logics are made manifest in urban and rural landscapes — through the way networked nodes are situated, the way services are deployed, the way resources are stored and circulated, and how all this activity is tracked and optimized and represented on apps and maps. How are people integrated into these systems? How does their presence impact communities?
Artifact Analysis Presentations: Mia, Yingru, Clara, Miri, Keaton, Alice
To be reviewed for today’s class:
- Michael Osman, “Cold Storage and the Speculative Market of Preserved Assets” in Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2018): 45-80.
- Jesse LeCavalier, “All Those Numbers: Logistics, Territory, and Walmart,” Places Journal (May 2010).
- Victor Luckerson, “How a City Fought Runaway Capitalism and Won,” New York Times (November 15, 2019) [on the rural dollar-store economy and food geography].
- Kathleen Griesbach, Adam Reich, Luke Elliott-Negri, and Ruth Milkman, “Algorithmic Control in Platform Food Delivery Work,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World (2019) [this is impressive research, and the authors offer a very detailed analysis; you’re welcome to skim by reading the intro’s and conclusions to each section 😉].
- Scott Shane, “Prime Mover: How Amazon Wove Itself Into the Life of an American City,” New York Times (November 30, 2019) [wouldn’t this make for a great ethnographic study?].
- Matthew Haag and Winnie Hu, “1.5 Million Packages a Day: The Internet Brings Chaos to NY Streets,” New York Times (October 27, 2019).
- What forms of distribution seem to defy an algorithmic logic? Rowan Moore Gerety, “The Afterlife of American Junk,” Harper’s (June 2019) [This piece examines the local economies that form around global logistics, which is our theme for next week. There’s a lot of anthropological research on waste management; see below].
Supplemental Resources:
- Discard Studies.
- Neils van Doorn, “Platform Labor.”
- Rosalind Fredericks, Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018).
- Emma Knight, “It’s the Algorithm, It Decides: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Algorithmic Systems of Management in On-Demand Food Delivery Work in Amsterdam,” Masters Thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2019.
- Jesse LeCavalier, “The Restlessness of Objects,” Cabinet 47 (2012): 90 – 97.
- Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
- Josh Lepawsky, Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste (MIT Press, 2018).
- Clare Lyster, Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Our Cities (Birkhäuser, 2016).
- Shannon Mattern, “Middlewhere: Landscapes of Library Logistics,” Urban Omnibus (June 24, 2015).
- Kathleen M. Millar, Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump (Duke University Press, 2018).
- Nate Millington and Mary Lawhon, “Geographies of Waste: Conceptual Vectors from the Global South,” Progress in Human Geography 43:6 (2019).
- Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
- Dietmar Offenhuber, Waste Is Information: Infrastructure, Legibility and Governance (MIT Press, 2017).
- Dara Orenstein, Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2019).
- Joshua O. Reno, Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill (University of California Press, 2016).
- Julia Ticona, Alexandra Mateescu, and Alex Rosenblat, “Beyond Disruption: How Tech Shapes Labor Across Domestic Work & Ridehailing,” Data & Society (June 26, 2018).
- Tracy Lynn Vargas, “Dollar Store Economy: Reproducing Inequality Within the Organization of Retail Service Work,” Dissertation, Syracuse University, 2018.
- Tracy L. Vargas, “Employees or Suspects? Surveillance and Scrutinization of Low-Wage Service Workers in U.S. Dollar Stores,” Journal of Labor and Society 20 (2017): 207-30.