Infrastructure and Logistics Workshop in Week 5
Hi Oim-ers,
Below is the programme for the OiM workshop in week 5. I think that it will be a very exciting event where we can all engage with the latest research in the anthropology of infrastructure.Of course I expect you all to attend the workshop but it would be great if you would also come along to the drinks afterwards.
Objects in Motion: Infrastructure and Logistics Workshop
Week 5 – Tuesday February 18: 14.00-16.00
Seminar Room 64 Banbury Road
14.00-15.00: Talk by Dr Hege Høyer Leivestad, Stockholm University and LSE.
Title: An Anthropology of Logistics: Shipping Containers as Currency in a European Port
Abstract: While central to the world economy, the shipping container is also a seductive symbol of global trade, representing the illusion of friction-free flow of goods. This presentation takes the container and its anonymized cargo as a starting point and looks at how ‘container economies’ are constituted on the ground in a European port. The empirical focus of this talk lies on the Spanish Port of Algeciras Bay, a so-called transshipment hub at the Strait of Gibraltar used by global shipping lines a transit point along global maritime cargo routes. Focusing on the labour of logistical intermediaries in the port, I demonstrate how profit is both generated and questioned among workers in a context where the shipping container operates as a local currency. I argue that while the shipping industry foregrounds container mobility as measure of success and high production, these boxes of cargo furthermore sustain local labour hierarchies and are central to power negotiations.
Bio: Hege Høyer Leivestad is Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University and Visiting Researcher at London School of Economics and Political Science. Her current project Frontier Freight: Maritime Logistics at the Strait of Gibraltar is funded by the Swedish Research Council and deals with port economics, labor and global trade in southern Spain. Leivestad is author of the monograph Caravans: Lives on Wheels in Contemporary Europe (Bloomsbury 2018), and co-editor of Ethnographies of Conferences and Trade Fairs (Palgrave 2017).
15.00-16.00: Film Screening (20 min), Student Presentations/Q&A (20 min) and General Discussion (20 min)
Film: The Forgotten Space – Burch and Sekula (2020)
The film follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those alienated by the global transport system.
After 16.00 : Drinks
