CFP AAG Chicago, April 21–25, 2015
Logistics and Power
Sponsored by Political Geography Specialty Group
Organizers:
Martin Danyluk, University of Toronto
Kyle Loewen, University of British Columbia
Since the mid-twentieth century, the rise of logistics has played an important but underappreciated role in reconfiguring global socio-spatial relations. Emerging from military and imperialist origins, logistical developments like the intermodal shipping container, just-in-time production, and supply-chain management have been vital to both globalizing production and reorganizing forms of power. After being confined to business and management schools for several decades, logistics has only recently been taken up as an object of critical study (Bernes 2013; Bonacich and Wilson 2008; Cowen 2014; Hall and Hesse 2012; Hesse and Rodrigue 2004; Neilson 2012; Sekula 2002). Yet despite a growing body of research into the spatialities of global logistical systems, there is a need for further geographical reflection on the modes and structures of power at work within them.
This session therefore seeks to build wide-ranging critical conversations around the entanglements of logistics and power. For example, firms’ and states’ efforts to make commodity flows more efficient, flexible, and reliable are part of violent and contested processes rather than seamless, purely technical, or inherently beneficial operations. Cheap goods movement depends on increased worker exploitation and acts of dispossession throughout planetary distribution networks. In another sense, supply systems shape economic and political possibilities through the distribution of material resources and wastes, enabling certain ways of life while hindering others. Lastly, by organizing infrastructures of supply, logistics affects processes of social reproduction, with gendered implications for consumption and labor practices.
Yet while global supply chains create new mechanisms of exploitation and control, they also present new opportunities for political resistance and struggle (Herod 2000; Reifer 2004; Tsing 2009). In this spirit, we invite papers from a range of disciplinary, methodological, and conceptual orientations—including feminist, Marxist, queer, de-colonial, assemblage, and anti-racist theory—that foreground the power-laden geographies of logistics. Examples include but are encouraged to exceed:
- uneven geographies of race and commodity flow
- politics within the supply chain
- labor and the logistics revolution
- logistics, urbanization, and infrastructure
- the entanglement of war and trade
- logistics, imperialism, and territory
- gendered dynamics of logistics and social reproduction
- logistics and biopolitics
- ways of being and becoming that are made possible and foreclosed through supply infrastructure
- enclosure and dispossession within logistical systems
Please e-mail abstracts of up to 250 words to Martin Danyluk (martin.danyluk@utoronto.ca) and Kyle Loewen (kyle.loewen@geog.ubc.ca) by Friday, October 17, 2014. Be sure to include a title and contact information.
References
- Bernes, Jasper. 2013. “Logistics, Counterlogistics and the Communist Prospect.” Endnotes, September. http://endnotes.org.uk/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect.
- Bonacich, Edna, and Jake B. Wilson. 2008. Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
- Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Hall, Peter, and Markus Hesse, eds. 2012. Cities, Regions and Flows. London: Routledge.
- Herod, Andrew. 2000. “Implications of Just-in-Time Production for Union Strategy: Lessons from the 1998 General Motors-United Auto Workers Dispute.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (3): 521–47.
- Hesse, Markus, and Jean-Paul Rodrigue. 2004. “The Transport Geography of Logistics and Freight Distribution.” Journal of Transport Geography 12 (3): 171–84.
- Neilson, Brett. 2012. “Five Theses on Understanding Logistics as Power.” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 13 (3): 322–39.
- Reifer, Thomas Ehrlich. 2004. “Labor, Race, and Empire: Transport Workers and Transnational Empires of Trade, Production, and Finance.” In Labor versus Empire: Race, Gender, and Migration, edited by Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Raul A. Fernandez, Vivian Price, David Smith, and Linda Trinh Võ, 17–35. New York: Routledge.
- Sekula, Allan. 2002. Fish Story. 2nd ed. Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag.
- Tsing, Anna. 2009. “Supply Chains and the Human Condition.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society 21 (2): 148–76.