March 3: LOGISTICS III: At Port and Sea

Concluding our three-part logistics unit, we zoom out to examine global logistics and the infrastructures — from ports to software to international standards — that make it possible. We also consider how we might engage with these systems through ethnography and modes of mediation.

Artifact Analysis Presentations: Dalia, Collin, Eric, Joseph

Guest: Georgina Voss, Reader in Systems and Deviance @ London College of Communication; Spring 2020 Visiting Scholar in the New School Department of Anthropology

To be reviewed for today’s class:

• Charmaine Chua, Martin Danyluk, Deborah Cowan, and Laleh Khalili, “Introduction: Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36:4 (2018): 617-29.
• Charmaine Chua, “The Slow Boat to China,” The Disorder of Things (January 5, 2015).

• Miriam Posner, “The Software that Shapes Workers’ Lives,” New Yorker (March 12, 2019) [Posner is working on a book on the topic].
• Víctor Muñoz Sanz, “Researching Automated Landscapes,” Work, Body, Leisure (Het Nieuwe Instituut / Hatja Cantz Verlag, 2018).
• What escapes logistical logics? Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Some Problems with Scale” in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015): 36-43.

These next two pieces explore means of representing expansive, entangled logistical systems: 

• Alberto Toscano and Jeffrey Kinkle, “The Art of Logistics” in in Cartographies of the Absolute (Zero Books, 2015): 190-217.
• Shannon Mattern, “The Pulse of Global Passage: Listening to Logistics,” in Matthew Hockenberry, Nicole Starosielski, and Susan Zieger, eds., Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2020) [in case you’re interested, you’ll find relevant images and videos here].

Supplemental Resources:

• Joe Allen, “Studying Logistics,” Jacobin (February 12, 2015).
• Ashley Carse, Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal (MIT Press, 201).
• Charmaine Chua, “Sea Shipping and Climate Change: The Political Dimensions of Shipping Infrastructure,” “Sea Shipping and Climate Change,” Architectural League of New York (June 14, 2018) {video: 15:47}.
• Deborah Cowan, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
• Kate Davies and Liam Young, “Unknown Fields,” Architectural Association, London (November 11, 2016) {video: 1:24:26}.
• Rose George, Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Brings You 90 Percent of Everything (2013).
• Nicky Gregson, Mike Crang, and Constantinos N. Antonopoulos, “Holding Together Logistical Worlds: Friction, Seams, and Circulation in the Emerging ‘Global Warehouse,’” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35:3 (2019): 381 – 398.
• Matthew Hockenberry, Supply Studies Syllabus.
• Margaret Jack and Steven J. Jackson, “Logistics as Care and Control: An Investigation into the UNICEF Supply Division,” CHI 2016, San Jose, CA (2016).
• Anja Kanngieser, “Tracking and Tracing: Geographies of Logistical Governance and Laboring Bodies,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (2013): 594-610.
• Laleh Khalili’s work.
• Weiqiang Lin, “Catering for Flight: Rethinking Aeromobility as Logistics,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36:4 (2018): 683-700.
• Alexis Madrigal, “Containers” Podcast.
• Haley Markbreiter, “Deborah Cowen,” Full Stop (April 16, 2017).
• Sandra Mezzadra & Brett Neilson, “Extraction, Logistics, Finance” in The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019): 94-132.
• Miriam Posner, “See No Evil,” Logic 4 (2018).
• Ned Rossiter, Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares (Routledge, 2016).
• Victor M. Sanz, “Welcome to Futureland,” Volume 49 (2016): 33-38.
• Allan Sekula, Fish Story (1995).
• Allan Sekula, “Globalism’s Discontents and the Return of the Sea,” Architectural Association, London, November 10, 1999 {video: 64:07}.
• Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, Forgotten Space (2010) {film: 112:00}.
• Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton University Press, 2005).
• Anna Tsing, “Supply Chains and the Human Condition,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 21:2 (2009): 148-76.