Supply Studies

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Supply Studies Syllabus

The calamitous reach of the global commodity chain stands as a

monument to modernity’s practice of production. As contemporary
critiques consider its mounting intractability, they reveal the
worldwide pattern of logistical machinery given by the media forms
and historic technologies that govern its flow. In their conceptual
simplicity and historical transigence lies an opportunity for
transformation, for innovation, and for interruption. While the
vocabulary it draws on might seem familiar, the language of logistics
is not fixed. It must be made–and so can be re-made–by the tools
and techniques assembled every day in service to supply.

Indo Arya’s Warehouse at Hassangarh, Haryana. At the time of its opening

in 2012, India’s largest distribution center.
This document, intended for collaborative iteration, presents a
series of readings in areas of interest to the critical study of logistics.
It begins with an opening “Stage Setting” section and continues on
to topics in: Logistical Media; Mining and Extraction; Production
and Assembly; Shipping, Storage, Distribution; Speculations on
Supply; Activism and Resistance; Logistical Histories; Commodity
Communications; Migration, Mobility, and Movement;
Corporations and Capitalism; Computational Production;
Infrastructures and Spaces; and Consumers and Consumption. The
goal is to present a broad selection of texts from which more
specialized seminars can be developed, or which could be
incorporated into other courses.

It also serves as a more general introduction to the field. To this end,

it contains supplemental Reference Materials, including Logistics
Textbooks and a sample of Logistical Regulations, reports, and
legislation, as well as a section on Logistics in Media, including
documentaries, cinema, games, literature, and art. It also presents an
overview of the Critical Logistics Community detailing Special
Issues on Logistics, Syllabi and Conferences, Projects and Groups,
Broader Advocacy organizations, and a section on Logistical Praxis,
which collates tools for activities like Reverse Sourcing.

Stage Setting
These readings are intended as a broad introduction to supply
studies and the critical study of logistics. Working from a mixture of
popular and academic articles, these pieces either summarize broad
arguments in the field or offer points of discussion for an initial class
session centered on the contemporary discourse around logistics.

Neal Stephenson, “Mother Earth Mother Board,” Wired (December

1996).
"In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous
meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and
dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of
the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control
Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and
other previously unknown and unchronicled folk; also, biographical sketches
of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global
telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and
technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the
laying of the longest wire on Earth."

Michael Wilson, “Black Hole Base,” The Journal of Aesthetics and

Protest (2014).
"At the center of the Mira Loma, CA industrial district lies a large black pit.
When scanning the area for distinguishing features, it serves to orient. It's
the spiritual core of this particular 'sacrifice zone'—an area of ecological and
social degradation resulting from unregulated industry and exploitation. Mira
Loma sacrifices for the greater goods movement industry—the global supply
chain of invisible labor. The invisible labor force toils in factories overseas,
but also at ports, along rail lines, and in the many warehouses used to process
the flows of commodities."

Joe Allen, “Studying Logistics,” Jacobin (2015).

"The US economy revolves around the sprawling logistics industry, and the
potential power of these workers is enormous. Socialists should always seek a
political relationship with those sections of the working class that have the
potential power to elevate the organization and politics of the entire class.
Without a strong left wing based in the most powerful workplaces, both the
working-class movement and the socialist left will continue to be of marginal
influence."

Kenneth Tay and Matthew Hockenberry, “The Social Network of

Stuff: On Media, Logistics and Supply Chains,” interview for Public
Seminar (2018).
"No longer a mere subject of business management schools or an exclusive
expertise of the military, logistics has become a significant presence in recent
scholarship, particularly in the humanities, and is now frequently talked
about in fields such as geography, information studies, international relations,
and media studies. In its simplest definition, we might say that logistics is the
management of the flows and circulation of goods, ideas, and peoples, with a
typical emphasis placed on efficiency and optimization. Logistics may for all
intents and purposes appear to be fairly banal, as most media and
infrastructures are; but it is nonetheless encoded with its own politics and
affordances, like most media and infrastructures."

Kenneth Tay and Ned Rossiter, “Uneven Distribution: On Logistics

and Mediated Environments,” interview for Public Seminar (2019).
Miriam Posner, “The Software That Shapes Workers’ Lives,” The
New Yorker (March 12, 2019).
Charles Duhigg and David Barboz, “In China, Human Costs are
Built Into an iPad,” iEconomy Series, New York Times (January 25,
2012).
Todd Frankel, “The Cobalt Pipeline,” The Washington Post
(September 30, 2016).
Charmine Chua, “Logistics: Violence, Empire and Resistance,”
discussion with Laleh Khalili and Deborah Cowen, The Dissonance of
Things (May 2016).
"We take a look at the increasing ubiquity and prominence of logistics as a
mode for organizing social and spatial life. We discuss how this seemingly
banal concern with the movement of goods is actually foundational to
contemporary global capitalism and imperialism, reshaping patterns of
inequality, undermining labor power, and transforming strategies of
governance. We also ask: what might a counter-logistical project look like?
What role does logistics play in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles
across the globe?"

Logistical Media
Logistical media, John Durham Peters writes, are the media of
“orientation,” devices of cognitive, social, and political organization
and control like clocks, maps, and calendars. Critical for establishing
basic coordinates of time and space, they belong to “a neglected
category of media that are so fundamental that they rarely come into
view.” These media “do not necessarily have ‘content.'” Peters argues,
but rather exist “prior to and form the grid”” in which messages will
be sent. This “grid-like functioning” not only gestures to the
foundational work of media theorists such as Harold Innis, James
Carey, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Virilio, it suggests the ways this
definition has been taken up scholars like Peters, Judd Case, and Ned
Rossiter.

John Durham Peters, “Calendar, Clock, Tower” in Deus in Machina:

Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between, ed. Jeremy Stolow (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
"Peters provides a synthetic treatment of the long history of human efforts
to measure, divide, and coordinate space and time, demonstrating how
evolving technologies for orienting people have served as both partners and
competitors with religious institutions, disciplinary practices, and sources of
knowledge about the cosmos. From the development of systems of
calendrical reckoning for identifying religiously significant dates, and the
strategic use of towers for the diverse religious purposes of celestial and
terrestrial observation, to the surveillance of populations, and broadcasting
of messages, Peters introduces the notion of “logistical media” to refer to the
fundamental, pre-discursive mechanisms and techniques used to coordinate
communications and activities."

John Durham Peters and Jeremy Packer, “Becoming Mollusk,” in

Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility, and
Networks, eds. Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley (New
York: Routledge, 2012): 35-53.
Carolyn L. Kane and John Durham Peters, “Speaking Into the
iPhone: An Interview With John Durham Peters, or, Ghostly
Cessation for the Digital Age,” Journal of Communication Inquiry
(2010).
Judd Case, “Logistical Media: Fragments from Radar’s Prehistory,”
Canadian Journal of Communication 38 (2013): 379-395.
"In this article, we analyze some elements of radar prehistory to emphasize
the idea of ​logistic media. They order and arrange people and objects and
subtly influence our experiences of space and time. They focus on logistics,
feedback and remote control in communication. They also evoke the work of
Harold Innis, Norbert Wiener, James W. Carey, Lewis Mumford and Paul
Virilio, as well as the transitive model of communication. This article
considers the torpedo, the searchlight, the war horn and the death ray from a
logistical point of view, as precursors of the radar. He then proposes the
analysis of other logistic media."

Ned Rossiter, Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of

Logistical Nightmares (New York: Routledge, 2016).
"Infrastructure makes worlds. Software coordinates labor. Logistics governs
movement. These pillars of contemporary capitalism correspond with the
materiality of digital communication systems on a planetary scale. Ned
Rossiter theorizes the force of logistical media to discern how subjectivity
and labor, economy and society are tied to the logistical imaginary of
seamless interoperability. Contingency haunts logistical power. Technologies
of capture are prone to infrastructural breakdown, sabotage, and failure.
Strategies of evasion, anonymity, and disruption unsettle regimes of
calculation and containment. We live in a computational age where media,
again, disappear into the background as infrastructure. Software,
Infrastructure, Labor intercuts transdisciplinary theoretical reflection with
empirical encounters ranging from the Cold War legacy of cybernetics,
shipping ports in China and Greece, the territoriality of data centers, video
game design, and scrap metal economies in the e-waste industry. Rossiter
argues that infrastructural ruins serve as resources for the collective design of
blueprints and prototypes demanded of radical politics today."

Ned Rossiter, “Materialities of Software: Logistics, Labour,

Infrastructure,” in Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods,
Theories, eds. Paul Arthur and Katherine Bode (Berlin: Springer,
2014)
Ned Rossiter, “Locative Media as Logistical Media: Situating
Infrastructure and the Governance of Labor in Supply-Chain
Capitalism,” in Locative Media, eds. Gerard Goggin and Rowan
Wilken (New York: Routledge, 2014).
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (New York:
Verso, 1989).
Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2015).
Liam Cole Young, “Cultural Techniques and Logistical Media:
Tuning German and Anglo-American Media Studies,” M/C Journal
18, no 2 (2015).
"Presenting an overview of German debates, key thinkers, texts, and
concepts to English readers, this article offers a consideration of recent
Anglo-American work that resonates with German debates – specifically,
work by John Durham Peters and Ned Rossiter on logistical media and
Jonathan Sterne on formats – while synthesizing these traditions via the early
theorization of media by Harold Innis."

Mining and Extraction

The logistics of production’s upstream end is found in the
excavation of “natural” resources and the “raw” materials that lie
buried in the earth. But these materials are rarely as pristine as they
appear. While media studies has only recently begun to turn to the
complex materiality of media technologies, the study of extractive
regimes and the sites they occupy has been of longstanding interest
to anthropologists and ethnographers, just as the troubled practices
that occupy these operations suggest the need for deeper
connections to labor history.

James Smith and Jeffrey Mantz, “Do Cellular Phones Dream of Civil
War?: The Mystification of Production and the Consequences of
Technology Fetishism in the Eastern Congo,” in Inclusion and
Exclusion in the Global Arena (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “Extraction, logistics, finance:
Global crisis and the politics of operations,” Radical Philosophy 178
(Mar/Apr 2013): 8–18.
Matthew Hockenberry, “Inkonvensional Pathways: Soldered Supply
Chains From Indonesia’s Tin Islands,” in Objects In Motion:
Globalizing Technology, 66-78 (Washington DC: Smithsonian Press,
2016).
Ingrid Burrington, “Literal American Gold Mine” San Francisco Art
Quarterly (December 11, 2015).
Arie Altena, “Nikel and Nikel Materiality,” Sonic Acts (2015).
Alex Golub, Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and
Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2014).
"Leviathans at the Gold Mine is an ethnographic account of the relationship
between the Ipili, an indigenous group in Papua New Guinea, and the large
international gold mine operating on their land. Golub examines how "the
mine" and "the Ipili" were brought into being in relation to one another, and
how certain individuals were authorized to speak for the mine and others to
speak for the Ipili."

Andrew Walsh, “‘Hot money’ and daring consumption in a northern

Malagasy sapphire-mining town,” American Ethnologist 30 (2003):
290–305.
"In Ambondromifehy, a sapphire-mining town in northern Madagascar,
young men earn and spend a great deal of what some call 'hot money.' Rather
than invest their earnings with long-term intentions considered responsible
and proper by some around them, they consume 'daringly' by spending
money to fulfill immediate desires. Walsh argues that such 'daring
consumption' might be understood as the active response of young men who
refuse the passive roles allotted them by both the sapphire trade and
traditional systems of social organization."

Environmental Impact
Stuart Kirsch, Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between
Corporations and Their Critics (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2014)
"Mining Capitalism examines the strategies through which corporations
manage their relationships with their critics and adversaries. By focusing on
the conflict over the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea,
Stuart Kirsch tells the story of a slow-moving environmental disaster and
the international network of indigenous peoples, advocacy groups, and
lawyers that sought to protect local rivers and rain forests."

Anthony Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury (eds.), Subterranean Struggles:

New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2013).
"Blending perspectives from geography and political ecology, this
pioneering essay collection probes the recent resurgence of global
investment in mineral and hydrocarbon extraction in Latin America,
examining the environmental and social consequences through a
 transdisciplinary lens."

Nicholas Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and

Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2011).
"On the basis of an examination of the colonial mercury and silver
production processes and related labor systems, Mercury, Mining, and
Empire explores the effects of mercury pollution in colonial Huancavelica,
Peru, and Potosí, in present-day Bolivia. The book presents a multifaceted
and interwoven tale of what colonial exploitation of indigenous peoples and
resources left in its wake. It is a socio-ecological history that explores the
toxic interrelationships between mercury and silver production, urban
environments, and the people who lived and worked in them."

Ted Genoways, “The Price of the Paperless Revolution,” Virginia

Quarterly Review (Fall 2010). // via.
Peter Whoriskey, “In Your Phone, In Their Air,” The Washington
Post (October 2, 2016).
Todd Frankel and Peter Whoriskey, “Tossed Aside in the White
Gold Rush,” The Washington Post (December 19, 2016).
Tim Maughan, “The Dystopian Lake Filled by the World’s Tech
Lust,” BBC Future (April 2, 2015).
"Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish
lake created by our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green
tech."

Mineral: Tin and Tantalum

June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and
Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1979).
"This book is about the high human cost of producing tin and other
minerals. June Nash vividly describes the arduous physical labor and life of
Bolivian miners in the physically inhospitable Andean mountains. More
than an anthropological account of indigenous miners in far-off Bolivia, the
book is a serious rendering of the contemporary social, economic, and
political reality at the industrial world periphery."

Mats Ingulstad, Andrew Perchard, Espen Storli (eds.), Tin and

Global Capitalism, 1850-2000: A History of “the Devil’s Metal”
(London: Routledge, 2015).
"Tin provides a particularly telling illustration of how the interactions of
business and governments shape the evolution of the global economic
trade; the tin industry has experienced extensive state intervention during
times of war, encompasses intense competition and cartelization, and has
seen industry centers both thrive and fail in the wake of decolonization.
This history reveals complex interactions and interdependencies between
local actors and international networks, decolonization and globalization,
as well as government foreign policies and entrepreneurial tactics."

Marina Welker, Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm

in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2014).
"Anthropologist Marina Welker draws on two years of research at
Newmont Mining Corporation’s Denver headquarters and its Batu Hijau
copper and gold mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, to address these questions.
Against the backdrop of an emerging Corporate Social Responsibility
movement and changing state dynamics in Indonesia, she shows how
people enact the mining corporation in multiple ways: as an ore producer,
employer, patron, promoter of sustainable development, religious sponsor,
auditable organization, foreign imperialist, and environmental threat."

James Smith, “Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan ore, temporal

dispossession, and ‘movement”’in the Eastern Democratic
Republic of the Congo,” American Ethnologist 38, no. 1 (February
2011): 17-35.
Animal: Ivory and Oil
Not all extractive sites are found under the earth. The story of ivory
remains a fascinating logistical case study of extraction, colonialism, and
the threat of material death. It also suggests radical disjunctures in
information between "upstream" and "downstream" sites on the ivory
supply chains. While the development of plastics lessened the threat of
material death (and Elephant extinction), the ivory trade is not entirely a
historical case.

Damon Tabor, “The Ivory Highway,” Men’s Journal (February 13,

2014).
Svati Kirsten Narula “Crush and Burn: A History of the Global
Crackdown on Ivory,” The Atlantic (January 27, 2014).
Martha Chaiklin, “Ivory in World History: Early Modern Trade in
Context,” History Compass 8, no. 6 (June 2010): 530-542.
Bryan Christy, “How Killing Elephants Finances Terror in Africa,”
National Geographic (August 12, 2015). // via
Laleh Khalili, “A World Built on Sand and Oil,” Lapham’s Quarterly
(2018).
Matthew Yeomans, Oil: a Concise Guide to the Most Important Product
on Earth (London: New Press, 2004).

Production and Assembly

Modern objects are networked objects. An entity like the mobile
phone is not only connected, literally, within the telecommunication
network. Like all global productions, it is inescapably enmeshed in
the material network of its making. It is composed of cadmium,
nickel, and lithium, constituted from gold, copper, tantalum, and tin.
Buy to this litany of already troublesome elements, a comprehensive
account must add actors, sites, and politics—both lives and ways of
life. And it must contend with the ideologies of assembly that have
brought them together. Consumer interest in distributed production
began with outsourcing in the textile industry, but critiques of global
assembly encompass everything from the hazards facing garment
workers in Bangladesh to the architectures of factory cities in China.

Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
"As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two
decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working
girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who
move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. The young
women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-
hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to
leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women,
workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the
socialist state, and the patriarchal family."

Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory

Women in Malaysia (Albany: Suny Press, 1987).
"Why are Malay women workers periodically seized by spirit possession on
the shopfloors of modern factories? Ong captures the disruptions, conflicts,
and ambivalences as they make the transition from peasant society to
industrial production. To discover the meaning that the market economy and
wage labor holds, Ong conducted anthropological field work in an
agricultural district in Selangor, Peninsular Malaysia, undergoing rapid
proletarianization. Weaving together history, ethnography, and quantitative
analysis, she shows how the diverging roles of young men and women are
increasingly channelled toward conformity with corporate culture and
capitalist discipline."

Matthew Hockenberry, “Material Epistemologies of the (Mobile)

Telephone,” Anthropology Quarterly 91, no. 2 (Spring 2018).
Seth Perlow, “On production for digital culture: iPhone Girl,
electronics assembly, and the material forms of aspiration,”
Convergence 17, no. 3 (2011): 245-269.
Jenny Chan and Pun Ngai, “Suicide as Protest for the New
Generation of Chinese Migrant Workers: Foxconn, Global Capital,
and the State,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 8, iss. 37, no. 2 (September 13,
2010);
Jenny Chan, Pun Ngai, and Mark Selden, “The politics of global
production: Apple, Foxconn and China’s new working class,” New
Technology, Work and Employment 28, no. 2 (July 2013): 100–115.
Steven Mckay, Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands?: The Politics of High-Tech
Production in the Philippines (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2006).

Textiles and Fashion

Rob Horning, “The Accidental Bricoleurs,” n+1 (2011).
Leslie Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
(New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009).
Hasan Ashraf, “Beyond Building Safety: An Ethnographic Account
of Health and Well-Being on the Bangladesh Garment Shop Floor,”
in Unmaking the Global Sweatshop: Health and Safety of the World’s
Garment Workers, eds. Rebecca Prentice and Geert De Neve
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 250-274.
Lamia Karim, “Disposable Bodies: Garment Factory Catastrophe
and Feminist Practices in Bangladesh,” Anthropology Now 6, no. 1
(2014): 52-63.
Rashedur Chowdhury, “Rana Plaza fieldwork and academic anxiety:
some reflections,” Journal of Management Studies 54, no. 7 (2017),
1111-1117.

Apple, Foxconn, and Shenzhen

 Cam Simpson, “An iPhone Tester Caught in Apple’s Supply
Chain,” Bloomberg (November 7, 2013).
Lisa Nakamura, “Economies of Digital Production in East Asia
iPhone Girls and the Transnational Circuits of Cool,” Media Fields
Journal, no.2 (2011). // via
“The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-
2014),” Nào (闹) Blog (2014).
Tim Maughan, “The Changing Face of Shenzhen, the World’s
Gadget Factory,” Motherboard (August 19, 2015).
Bunnie Huang and Wired, “Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of
Hardware” Wired, Future Cities (June 7, 2016);
Nicole Scott and Mobilegeeks, “Shenzhen Smartphone Market
(Walking through the Yuanwang Digital Mall),” Mobilegeeks (May 11,
2015).
Anita Chan, “The Culture of Survival: Lives of Migrant Workers
Through the Prism of Private Letters,” in Popular China: Unofficial
Culture in a Globalizing Society, eds. Perry Link, Richard Madsen,
and Paul Pickowicz (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 163-188.
Jenny Chan, “A Suicide Survivor: the Life of a Chinese Worker,”
New Technology, Work and Employment 28, no. 2 (2013), 84-99.

Modes of Production
James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos, The Machine That
Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production (New York: Free
Press, 2007).
Kim Moody, “The Rise and Limits of Lean Production,” in Workers
in a Lean World (New York: Verso, 1997), 85-113.
Bruce Allen, “The Logistics Revolution and Transportation” The
 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 553
(September 1997), 106-116.
Brian Holmes, “Do Containers Dream of Electric People: The
Social Form of Just-in-time Production,” Open no. 21 (2011).
Beth Gutelius, “Disarticulating distribution: Labor segmentation
and subcontracting in global logistics,” Geoforum 60 (March 2015):
53–61.
Brian Ashton, “The Factory Without Walls,” _Mute_ (September
2006).
David E. Nye, America’s Assembly Line (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2013).

Shipping, Storage, Distribution

The most emblematic images of logistics are of storage and
distribution. These are the massive warehouses stacked high with
boxes, the colossal container ships that ferry them the world over,
the “tens of thousands of human workers” laboring amid a gigantic
system “of steel and silicon.” And for good reason. The container
conjures a “smooth, lossless,” “almost immaterial” image of
transportation, so much so that, Alexander Klose writes, it is “easily
forgotten” that it was “a change in the fundamental order of
thinking.” For Deborah Cowen, an object like the container is thus a
symbol of “logistics space,” a cartography defined by the global
networks of circulation. For Klose, it is a “time capsule.” “Enclosed
and sealed in the container,” he writes, cargo is removed from the
continuum in which it is produced, emerging sometime in the
future.

Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in

Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
"In The Deadly Life of Logistics, Cowen traces the art and science of
logistics from the battlefield to the boardroom and back. Focusing on choke
points such as national borders, zones of piracy, blockades, and cities, she
tracks contemporary efforts to keep goods circulating and brings to light the
collective violence these efforts produce. All the while investigating how the
military origins of logistics played a critical role in the making of the global
economic order-—not simply the globalization of production, but the
invention of the supply chain and the reorganization of national economies
into transnational systems."

Edna Bonacich, Jake B. Wilson, Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the
Logistics Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
"Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson look at the ports of Los Angeles and
Long Beach to examine the impact of the logistics on workers in distribution.
Built around the invention of shipping containers and communications
technology, the logistics 'revolution' has enabled retailers like Walmart and
Target to sell cheap consumer products made using low-wage labor in
developing countries. Shipped through an efficient, low-cost, intermodal
freight system, containers move from factories in Asia to distribution centers
across the United States without ever being opened. Bonacich and Wilson
follow these flows, exploring the importers, container shipping companies,
the ports, railroad and trucking companies, and warehouses."

Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An

Economist Examines the Markets, Power and Politics of the World Trade
(Hoboken: Wiley, 2005).
"Tracing a T-shirt's life story from a Texas cotton field to a Chinese factory
and back to a U.S. storefront before arriving at the used clothing market in
Africa, the book uncovers the political and economic forces at work in the
global economy. Along the way, this fascinating exploration addresses a
wealth of compelling questions about politics, trade, economics, ethics, and
the impact of history on today's business landscape. This new printing of the
second edition includes a revised preface and a new epilogue with updates
through 2014 on the people, industries, and policies related to the T-shirt's
life story."

Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible

Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on
Your Plate (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013).
Thomas Birtchnell, Satya Savitzky, John Urry (eds), Cargomobilities:
Moving Materials in a Global Age (New York: Routledge, 2015).
Tim Maughan, “The Invisible Network that Keeps the World
Running” BBC Future (February 9, 2015)
Tim Maughan, “The Inevitable Rise of the Internet of Shipping
Containers,” Motherboard (September 24, 2015)
Joshua Davis, “High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas,” Wired
(February 25, 2008).

Container Technologies
Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World
Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
Richard Pollak, The Colombo Bay (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2004).
Craig Martin, Shipping Container (London: Bloomsbury “Object
Lessons” Series, 2016).
Craig Martin, “Shipping Container Mobilities, Seamless
Compatibility, and the Global Surface of Logistical Integration.”
Environment and Planning A 45, no. 5 (2013): 1021–36.
Charmaine Chua, “Slow Boat To China: A Container Ship
Ethnography,” Series, The Disorder of Things (2015). // via
Alexis Madrigal, Containers Series (Doral, FL: Fusion Media Group,
2017).
 Alexander Klose, The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the
Way We Think, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015).
Jacob Hodes, “Whitewood under Siege,” Cabinet 53 (Winter
2013/14).
Beth Kowitt, “It’s Ikea’s world. We just live in it,” Fortune (2015).
"The magic of flat packing allows goods to be jammed into shipping
containers without wasting any space. Wasted space means wasted money
and is also environmentally unfriendly. 'I hate air,' says Dickner. In the
beginning of the 2000s, the company did an internal air hunt competition.
The winner, who received a two-week vacation to Thailand, came up with a
better way of transporting tea lights. They had been packaged loosely in a
bag, but a Dutchman had the idea of stacking them in rows and vacuum
sealing them. The metal cups encasing the candles were redesigned to sit
neatly on top of one another. Ikea then borrowed from another very
Nordic industry in constructing a machine that could sort them. 'We
looked at how to pack fish sticks.'"

Warehouses, Walmart, and the Everything Store

Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of
Fulfillment (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2016).
Jesse LeCavalier, “All Those Numbers: Logistics, territory and
Walmart,” Places Journal (May 2010).
Dara Orenstein, “Warehouses on wheels,” Society and Space 36, no. 4
(2018).
Edna Bonachich and Khaleelah Hardie, “Walmart and the
Logistics Revolution, in Nelson Lichtensstein, ed., Walmart: The
Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism New York: The New Press,
2006): 163-188.
Nicky Gregson, Mike Crang, and Constantinos N. Antonopoulos,
 “Holding together logistical worlds: Friction, seams and circulation
in the emerging ‘global warehouse,’”” Society and Space (2017).
Nick Statt, “How Amazon’s Retail Revolution is Changing the Way
We Shop,” The Verge (October 23, 2018).
Bryan Menegus, “Amazon’s Last Mile.” Gizmodo (November 16,
2017).
Mac McClelland, “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave,” Mother Jones
(March/April, 2012). // via.
Gethin Chamberlain, “Underpaid and Exhausted: the Human Cost
of Your Kindle.” The Guardian (June 9, 2018)
Alana Semuels, “The Internet is Enabling a New Kind of Poorly-
Paid Hell,” The Atlantic (January 23, 2018).
Alana Semuels, “What Amazon Does to Poor Cities,” The Atlantic
(February 1, 2018)
Ingrid Burrington, “Why Amazon’s Data Centers are hidden in Spy
Country,” The Atlantic (January
8, 2016).

Speculations on Supply
Supply chains are not new, Anna Tsing reminds us, they extend as far
as trade itself. What is new is the “sense of possibility that supply
chains offer.” Founded on “the enhanced mobility of labor and the
economic and political vulnerabilities created by recent forms of
imperialism and histories of global war,” production was no longer
composed of silo-ed sites of assembly. It was a “networked
enterprise,” tightly coupling suppliers and distributors to maximize
the efficiency of the productive process. With associations formed
by arrangements of subcontracting, outsourcing, and an overriding
logic of flexibility and interchange, “supply chain capitalism” has
produced new possibilities for exploitation and defined new
subjectivities for those within its web. So too, it demands
correspondingly new ways of thinking to unravel them. To that end,
this section engages with the critiques and critical theories that
engage with the supply chain, logistics, and the global system of
circulation.

Anna Tsing, “Supply Chains and the Human Condition,” Rethinking

Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society 21, no. 2 (2009);
Alberto Toscano, “Lineaments of the Logistical State,” Viewpoint
Magazine, no. 4 (September-October 2014).
"It has long been noted that the apparatuses of control and accumulation
that structure the social and material reality of circulation – transport, the
energy industry and, after World War Two, 'business logistics' – though born
to break the bargaining power of transport workers and accumulate profits by
annihilating space and depressing wages, have also, especially through their
energetic dimensions, created dynamic arenas for class struggle."

Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute

(London: Zero Books, 2015).
Deborah Cowen, “Disrupting Distribution: Subversion, the Social
Factory, and the ‘State’ of Supply Chains,” Viewpoint Magazine, no. 4
(September-October 2014).
"We have entered a time of logistics space. Contemporary capitalism is
organized as a dispersed but coordinated system, where commodities are
manufactured across vast distances, multiple national borders, and complex
social and technological infrastructures. Geopolitical economies that were
previously governed largely at the national scale – even though as part of a
global system of trading nation states – have been reordered into
transnational circulatory systems."

Sergio Bologna, “Inside Logistics: Organization, Work, Distinctions”

Viewpoint Magazine, no. 4 (September-October 2014).
"Logistics can never be understood from outside the warehouse, only by
coming inside and looking at the techniques employed, the equipment and
the organization of work does one understand if we find ourselves faced with
something that belongs to the new economy, in the real sense of the term, or
that resembles the sweatshops of Bangladesh. There is therefore no
organization of standardized labor with specific figures, because every
commodity sector has its specificity in industrial logistics, and because in
distribution logistics, not all goods are subject to the same treatment (think
only of perishable products, the cold chain or dangerous and toxic products).
Speaking in the generic sense of “logistics” does not lead us anywhere."

Davide Gallo-Lassere, Frédéric Monferrand, and Sergio Bologna,

“From the Factory to the Container: Interview with Sergio Bologna,”
Période (in French; 2019).
Chandra Mukerji, “The Territorial State as a Figured World of
Power: Strategics, Logistics, and Impersonal Rule.” Sociological
Theory 28:4 (2010): 402-424.
Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the
Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
Brett Neilson, “Five Theses on Understanding Logistics as Power,”
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 13, no. 2 (2012)
Martin Danyluk, “Capital’s logistical fix: Accumulation,
globalization, and the survival of capitalism” in Charmaine Chua,
Martin Danyluk, Deborah Cowen, Laleh Khalili, “Turbulent
Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics,” Society
and Space 36, no. 4 (August 2018).
"Since the mid-20th century, logistics has evolved into a wide-ranging
science of circulation involved in planning and managing flows of
innumerable kinds. In this introductory essay, we take stock of the
ascendancy and proliferation of logistics, proposing a critical engagement
with the field. We argue that logistics is not limited to the management of
supply chains, military or corporate. Rather, it is better understood as a
calculative logic and spatial practice of circulation that is at the fore of the
reorganization of capitalism and war. Viewed from this perspective, the rise
of logistics has transformed not only the physical movement of materials but
also the very rationality by which space is organized. It has remade economic
and military space according to a universalizing logic of abstract flow,
exacerbating existing patterns of uneven geographical development. Drawing
on the articles that make up this themed issue, we propose that a critical
approach to logistics is characterized by three core commitments: (1) a
rejection of the field’s self-depiction as an apolitical science of management,
along with a commitment to highlighting the relations of power and acts of
violence that underpin it; (2) an interest in exposing the flaws, irrationalities,
and vulnerabilities of logistical regimes; and (3) an orientation toward
contestation and struggle within logistical networks."

Jasper Bernes, “Logistics, Counterlogistics, and the Communist

Propspect,” Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes
(September 2013).

Black Studies
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive
Planning and Black Study, especially “Fantasy in the Hold”
(Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2013).
"In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the
theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires,
and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic
critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by
mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist
logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working
from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and
Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround,
planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global
 blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the
self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every
night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons."

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham:

Ducke University Press, 2016)
Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

Activism and Resistance

As a site of resistance against global capital, the supply chain shares
none of the power present in the gatherings once found on the
planation or the factory floor. As Charmaine Chua explains, sites like
the containerized port have all but been “evacuated of the workers”
they once “depended so heavily upon.” Supply chain management
has shifted capital’s focus from the sites of production to those of
circulation, and as a consequence, “the mass labor force expelled
from the factory floors of the world has now spilled into the streets,
articulating their dissatisfaction with the state of things through
uprisings, strikes, blockades, and riots.” Has this dispersal, Chua
asks, “foreclosed collective action”? If not—if the supply chain may
yet be thought of “as a scattered entity” with which one may still
engage—then what are its points of vulnerability, the best means of
confrontation, and the most effective form of this resistance?

Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness, eds., Choke Points:

Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2018).
"The global economy seems indomitable. Goods travel all over the globe,
supplying just-in-time retail stocks, keeping consumers satisfied and
businesses profitable. But there are vulnerabilities, and Choke Points reveals
them—and the ways that workers are finding ways to make use of the power
that those choke points afford them. Exploring a number of case studies
around the world, this book uncovers a little-known network of resistance by
logistics workers worldwide who are determined to contest their exploitation
by the forces of global capital. Through close accounts of wildcat strikes,
roadblocks, and boycotts, from South China to Southern California, the
contributors build a picture of a movement that flies under the radar, but
carries the potential to force dramatic change."

Charmaine Chua, “Logistics, Capitalist Circulation, Chokepoints,”

The Disorder of Things (September 9, 2014).
“Disaster Communism III: Logistics, Repurposing, Bricolage,”
Libcom (May 22, 2014).
“Choke Points: Mapping an Anticapitalist Counter-logistics in
California,” Libcom (July 21, 2014).
Seattle N30 Logistical Crew, “Seattle Logistics Zine” (1999).
Alberto Toscano. “Logistics and Opposition,” Mute (August 2011).
Brian Ashton, “Logistics Explained,” Labournet (March 25, 2007).
Niccolò Cuppini, Mattia Frapporti, Floriano Milesi, Luca Padova,
Maurilio Pirone, “Logistics and Crisis: The Supply Chain System in
the Po Valley Region,” for Teaching the Crisis – Geographies,
Methodologies, Perspectives (2013).
Laleh Khalili, “The Logistics of Counterinsurgency,” Georgetown
University, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (May 2006).
Sarah-Joyce Battersby, “Inside Toronto’s Black Lives Matter Camp,”
Toronto Star (April 3, 2016).
Edna Bonacich, “Labor and the global logistics revolution,” in
Critical Globalization Studies (New York: Routledge, 2005), 359–368.
Shiri Pasternak, “The economics of insurgency: Thoughts on Idle No
More and critical infrastructure,” Rabble (January, 2013).
Anna Curcio, “Practicing militant inquiry: Composition, strike and
betting in the logistics workers struggles in Italy,” ephemera: theory
and politics in organization 14, no. 3 (2014). // via
Katie Mazer and Martin Danyluk, “Mapping a Many Headed Hydra:
The Struggle Over the Dakota Access Pipeline,” Infrastructure
Otherwise Report 001 (2017).
Iris Young, “From Guilt to Solidarity: Sweatshops and Political
Responsibility,” Dissent 50 no. 2 (2003), 39-44
Sonja Mönkedieck, “The iPhone 4CF (Conflict Free): The Yes Men
Address the Conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,”
Liminalities 7, no. 4 (2011), 1-15.

Logistical Histories
The supply chain has a hard origin point in history—when business
consultant Keith Oliver proposed, in a meeting with the Dutch
consumer electronics manufacturer Philips, the idea of managing
production, marketing, distribution, sales, and finance “as though”
they were a single entity. He called the approach, “supply chain
management.” But logistical operation has a far more ancient lineage
than this. Since the beginning of time humans have exchanged
goods, moved materials, and distributed the work of production.
Historical accounts that are relevant to the study of logistics include
its recognition in the art of war and its adoption by businesses for
the optimization of transportation and manufacture, but they also
include broader histories of commodity exchange, labor, and nature.

Michael Stamm, Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in

Twentieth-Century North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2018).
James Schwoch, Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North
American Frontier (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 31.
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf,
2014).
"Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its
history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Sven
Beckert tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European
entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world’s most significant
manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with
new machines and wage workers to change the world. The empire of cotton
was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves
and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Beckert
makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, and
how the present global world came to exist."

Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar and Modernity
(New York: Viking, 1985).
"Studying a single food or commodity such as sugar may seem like an
incongruous project for an anthropologist who claims to work mostly with
living people. Still, it is a rich subject for someone interested in the history
and character of the modern world, for its importance and popularity rose
together with tea, colonial slavery, and the machine era. Had it not been for
the immense importance of sugar in the world history of food, and in the
daily lives of so many, I would have left it alone ... My work on sugar,
_Sweetness and Power_, situates it within Western history because it was an
old commodity, basic to the emergence of a global market."

Deborah Cowen, “A Geography of Logistics: Market Authority and

the Security of Supply Chains,” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 100, no. 3 (2010)
Deborah Cowen, “Logistics’ Liabilities,” LIMN 1: Systemic Risk
(June 2011).
Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Commodity
Chains in the World-Economy Prior to 1800,” Review (Fernand
Braudel Center) 10, no. 1 (Summer 1986): 157-170.

Logistics and War

James A. Huston, The Sinews of War: Army Logistics, 1775-1953
(Washington DC: Center of Military History, United States Army,
1997).
Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to
Patton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
John A. Lynn (ed), Feeding Mars: Logistics In Western Warfare From
The Middle Ages To The Present (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994).
Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York:
Zone Books, 1991).
Derek Gregory, “Supplying war in Afghanistan: the frictions of
distance,” Open Democracy (June 11, 2012).
Thomas Nail, Theory of the Border (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016).
Manuel DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1991).

Historiography
Martin T. Farris, “Evolution of Academic Concerns with
Transportation and Logistics,” Transportation Journal 37, no. 1 (Fall
1997): 42-50.
M.L. Emiliani, “Historical Lessons in Purchasing and Supplier
Relationship Management,” Journal of Management History 16, no. 1,
(2010): 116-136.
Paul L. Govekar and Michele A. Govekar, “The Parable of the Pig
Iron: Using Taylor’s Story to Teach the Principles of Scientific
 Management,” Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice 12, no.
2 (2012).

Primary Sources
Peter Drucker, “The Economy’s Dark Continent,” Fortune (April
1962).
Le Baron de Jomini, Précis de l’Art de la Guerre: Des Principales
Combinaisons de la Stratégie, de la Grande Tactique et de la Politique
Militaire (Brussels: Meline, Cans et Copagnie, 1838); Translated as
The Art of War, G.H. Mendell and W.P. Craighill (trans)
(Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1862); see also Introductory Material
to Summary of the Art of War (1854; GPO, Combat Studies
Institute).
Tim Laseter and Keith Oliver, “When Will Supply Chain
Management Grow Up?” Strategy and Business 32 (Fall 2003).
Arnold Kransdorff, “High stock levels—not the answer to volatile
demand, Arnold Kransdorff reports on ‘supply chain
management,'” Financial Times (June 4, 1982), p.18.
Edward W. Smykay and Bernard J. LaLonde, Physical Distribution
Management (London, The Macmillan Company, 1968).
Bernard J. LaLonde, John R. Grabner, and James F. Robeson,
“Integrated Distribution Management: A Management
Perspective,” The International Journal of Physical Distribution 44, no.
1 (1970).
Raymond Lekashman and John F. Stolle, “The Total Cost
Approach to Distribution,” Business Horizons 8 no. 4 (1965): 33-46.

Commodity Communications
In a 1928 letter to Henry Ford, José Eustasio Rivera suggested that,
were rubber to speak, “…it would exhale the most accusing wail,
formed by the cries of flesh torn away by the whip, the moans of
bodies devastated by hunger and swollen by beriberi, and the
screams of the exploited and persecuted tribes.” Things cannot
speak, but this has not stopped them from being ventriloquized for
all sorts of purposes. In early capitalism so-called “it-narratives”
functioned as a way to understand the changes that had taken place
in the production of things, and legacy of this genre has persisted as
they have become ever-more complex, spread out throughout the
supply chain.

Leonard E. Read, “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E.

Read, Library of Economics and Liberty (1958) and Anne Elizabeth
Moore, “Milton Friedman’s Pencil,” The New Inquiry (2012).
Emily Green, “Memoirs of a Musical Object, Supposedly Written by
Itself: It–Narrative and Eighteenth–Century Marketing,” Current
Musicology 95 (2013).
Annie Leonard, “The Story of Stuff,” Footnote and Annotated
Script, Story of Stuff Project (2007); and also “The Story of Bottled
Water” (2010); “The Story of Electronics” (2011).
Mark Blackwell, “The It-Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England:
Animals and Objects in Circulation,” Literature Compass 1, no. 1
(2004).
Christina Lupton, Heather Keenleyside, Liz Bellamy, Mark
Blackwell (eds), British It-Narratives, 1750-1830 (London: Pickering &
Chatto, 2012).
Bruce Robbins, “Commodity Histories,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005).
Howard Morland, The Secret That Exploded (New York: Random
House, 1981).
Ethnographies of Circulation
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility
of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2015).
Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that
grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere.
Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in
daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes
commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers
insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial
question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made? A tale of
diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the
World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to
explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied
and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese
gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi
Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions
also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand
the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.

Brenda Chalfin, Shea Butter Republic: State Power, Global Markets and
the Making of an Indigenous Commodity (New York: Routledge,
2004). // via
Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium
Trade (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).

New Materialisms and Theories of Things

Bill Brown, Things (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004).
"This book is an invitation to think about why children chew pencils; why
we talk to our cars and computers; rosary beads and worry beads; the
fetishism of daily life in different times and in different cultures. It is an
invitation to rethink several topics of critical inquiry—camp, collage,
primitivism, consumer culture, museum culture, the aesthetic object, still
life, "things as they are," Renaissance wonders, "the thing itself "—within
the rubric of "things," not in an effort to foreclose the question of what
sort of things these seem to be, but rather to suggest new questions about
how objects produce subjects, about the phenomenology of the material
everyday, about the secret life of things."

Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1986).
"The meaning that people attribute to things necessarily derives from
human transactions and motivations, particularly from how those things
are used and circulated. The contributors to this volume examine how
things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both
present and past. Focusing on culturally defined aspects of exchange and
socially regulated processes of circulation, the essays illuminate the ways in
which people find value in things and things give value to social relations.
By looking at things as if they lead social lives, the authors provide a new
way to understand how value is externalized and sought after."

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham:

Duke, 2010).
Jane Bennett, “Commodity Fetishism and Commodity
Enchantment,” in The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 111-130.
Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (New York: Open Humanities
Press, 2011).
Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
Harvey Molotch, Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars,
 Computers, and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are (London:
Routledge, 2003).
Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” in Border Fetishisms: Material
Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patria Spyer (London: Routledge,
1997).

Migration, Mobility, and

Movement
Global logistics depends on movement, on scale and on speed. It
operationalizes and operates on the minute movements of fingers
and hands, just as it does gross navigation across vast distance. It is
this latter association that this section considers, examining the
relationship of logistics and migratory labor. Throughout much of
the Global North, migrant laborers are responsible for many of the
logistical operations of urban life: driving, delivering, picking, and
packing. They work in warehouses and factories, kitchens and
homes. And indeed, this recurring tension between urban and rural
drives productive potential throughout the world. Even in industries
as fundamental as consumer electronics, global consumption
depends on products produced (cheaply) as a result of the largest
migrations in human history.

Craig Martin, “Desperate Mobilities: Logistics, Security and the

Extra-Logistical Knowledge of ‘Appropriation.’” Geopolitics 17 no. 2
(2012): 355–76.
Gargi Bhattacharyya, Traffick: The Illicit Movement of People and Things
(London: Pluto Press 2005).
Anja Kanngieser, “Tracking and Tracing: Geographies of Logistical
Governance and Labouring Bodies,” Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 31, no. 4 (August 2013): 594-610.
Hairong Yan, New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and
Women Workers in China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary
during Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). // via.
Kwame Appiah, “The Case for Contamination,” New York Times
Magazine (January 1, 2006).

Deviant Circulation
Nils Gilman, Steven Weber, and Jesse Goldhammer, Deviant
Globalization (London: Continuum, 2011).
Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska (eds.), The Pirate Book
(Ljubljana: Aksioma, 2015).
Digital Citizens Alliance, “Busted, But Not Broken: The State of
Silk Road and the Darknet Marketplaces” (April 2014).
!MEDIENGRUPPE BITNIK, “Random Darknet Shopper” (2014)
and Daniel Rivero, “Robots are starting to break the law and
nobody knows what to do about it,” Fusion (December 2014).
Nicolas Christin, “Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis
of a large anonymous online marketplace,” CyLab Technical
Report, Carnegie Mellon University (July 30, 2012).
David Segal, “Eagle Scout. Idealist. Drug Trafficker?,” The New York
Times (January 18, 2014).
Nate Anderson and Cyrus Farivar, “How the feds took down the
Dread Pirate Roberts,” Arstechnica (October 3, 2013).
Andy Greenberg, “Waiting for Dark: Inside Two Anarchists’ Quest
for Untraceable Money,” Wired (July 11, 2014).
Luca Rastello, I Am the Market: How to Smuggle Cocaine by the Ton,
in Five Easy Lessons, Jonathan Hunt (trans) (London: Granta, 2010).
 Elliot Anderson, “It’s a Pirate’s Life for Some: The Development of
an Illegal Industry in Response to an Unjust Global Power
Dynamic,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 17, no. 2, (Summer
2010): 319-339.

Corporations and Capitalism

While critiques of the corporation reach back to the birth of
capitalism, one of the first critiques of the supply chain came when
protesters targeted Dow Chemical’s manufacture of napalm. The
conclusion—that corporations should be responsible for what they
produce—served to negotiate the relationship between publics and
products. As corporations became increasingly complex, however,
this connection was no longer so clear. When evidence was found in
1996 of child labor in textile outsourcing, the public outcry that
resulted from Nike’s infamous “sweatshop summer” signaled a
renegotiation of corporate responsibility. Companies were now to be
held accountable for the whole of their supply chain.

Pietra Rivoli and Sandra Waddock, “‘First They Ignore You…’: The
Time-Context Dynamic and Corporate Responsibility,” California
Management Review 53, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 87-104.
"Pietra Rivoli and Sandra Waddock acknowledge that corporate social
responsibility (CSR) discussions often fall prey to a logical trap. If some
socially desirable activity is profitable, then it is best described as “intelligent
operation of the business.” When private profits and public welfare are
aligned, CSR is irrelevant. If the socially desirable activity is not profitable,
then companies will not voluntarily undertake it unless required to do so by
law or regulation. The concept of CSR is “intensely confused” because in
both the above cases it is not a useful construct; CSR is either irrelevant or
ineffective."

Anne Mayhew, Narrating the Rise of Big Business in the USA: How
Economists Explain Standard Oil and Wal-Mart (New York: Routledge,
2008).
"'This is a story about stories and specifically about some of the stories that
Americans have told themselves about corporate economic power.' In this
book, Anne Mayhew focuses on the stories surrounding the creation of
Standard Oil and Wal-Mart and their founders , John D. Rockefeller and Sam
Walton, combining the accounts of economists with the somewhat darker
pictures painted by writers of fiction to tease out the overarching narratives
associated with American big business."

Raluca Dragusanu, Daniele Giovannucci, and Nathan Nunn, “The

Economics of Fair Trade,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 3
(Summer 2014): 217–236.
Damani James Partridge, “Activist Capitalism and Supply-Chain
Citizenship: Producing Ethical Regimes and Ready-to-Wear
Clothes,” Current Anthropology 52, no. S3, (Supplement to April 2011):
S97-S111.

Supplier Responsibilities
Kim Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New
Global Orders (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2001).
Susan Schultz Huxman and Denice Beatty Bruce, “Toward a
dynamic generic framework of apologia: A case study of Dow
chemical, Vietnam, and the napalm controversy,” Communication
Studies 46 nos. 1-2 (1995): 57-72.
Sydney Schanberg, “On the playgrounds of America, Every Kid’s
Goal is to Score: In Pakistan, Where children stitch soccer balls
for Six Cents an hour, the goals is to Survive,” Life Magazine (June
1996): 38-48.
Richard Locke, “The Promise and Perils of Globalization: The
Case of Nike,” Industrial Performance Center, MIT, Working
 Paper (July 2002).
Richard Locke, Fei Qin, and Alberto Brause, “Does Monitoring
Improve Labor Standards? Lessons from Nike,” Corporate Social
Responsibility Initiative, Working Paper no. 24 (Cambridge: John
F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2006).
Dara O’Rourke, “Smoke From a Hired Gun: A Critique of Nike’s
Labor and Environmental Auditing in Vietnam as performed by
Ernst and Young,” CorpWatch (November 1997).
Simon Bøge “The Well-travelled Yoghurt pot: Lessons for new
Freight Transport Policies and Regional Production,” World
Transport Policy & Practice 1, no. 1 (1995): 7-11.
Stephen John New, “Modern Slavery and the Supply Chain: the
Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility?” Supply Chain
Management 20, no. 6 (2015), 697-707.

Computational Production
Software, Ben Bratton writes, is a “part of every supply chain.” And
indeed, it is impossible to speak of global logistics without
considering the logistical software systems that govern it.
Companies like SAP design integrated solutions that not only
manage the whole of the supply chain, they constitute it. If
production and digitization have become nearly synonymous, what
differrence is the container from the cloud?

Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015).
Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2015).
Moritz Altenried, “The Container and the Algorithm: Logistics in
Global Capitalism,” Période (in French; 2019)
Miriam Posner, “See No Evil,” Logic Magazine No. 4 (“Scale,” 2018).
R. Buckminster Fuller, “The World Game: Integrative Resource
Utilization Planning Tool,” World Resource Inventory (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University, 1971).

Enterprise Resource Planning

Vincent A. Mabert, “The Early Road to Material Requirements
Planning,” Journal of Operations Management 25 (2007): 346–356.
Mohammad A. Rashid, Liaquat Hossain, and Jon David Patrick,
“The Evolution of ERP Systems: A Historical Perspective” in
Enterprise Resource Planning: Global Opportunities and Challenges (Idea
Group, 2002).
Bill Waddell, “Farewell To APICS,” Kevin Meyer (2006).
Karl E. Kurbel, Enterprise Resource Planning and Supply Chain
Management: Functions, Business Processes and Software for
Manufacturing Companies (Berlin: Springer, Progress in IS, 2013).

Digital Supply Chains

“TorReaper,” “​ISIS Cyber Supply Chain,” Criticl (2015) and
Anthony Cuthbertson, “Anonymous #OpISIS: CloudFlare refuses
to block service to pro-ISIS websites,” International Business Times
(April 10, 2015).
Bobbie Johnson, Charles Arthur, and Josh Halliday, “Libyan
domain shutdown no threat, insists bit.ly,” The Guardian (October
9, 2010) and Bobbie Johnson, “Where in the world are those
shorteners taking you?,” The Guardian (October 9, 2010).
David Meyer, “The dark side of .io: How the U.K. is making web
 domain profits from a shady Cold War land deal,” Gigaom (June 30,
2014).
Rosie Cima, “The Rise and Fall of .Ly,” Priceonomics (October 23,
2015).
Olivia Solon, “Activists Target Yahoo Over Links to Ivory Trade,”
Wired (January 25, 2016).

Infrastructures and Spaces

Geography, Clare Lyster writes, “is no longer a prerequisite for
urbanism; the network is. At the same time that logistics denies
place, however, it would be misleading to say that it is completely a-
geographic.” Rather, it only “upends the city’s traditional reliance on
geophysical qualities to facilitate new possibilities…”

Clare Lyster, Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Our Cities
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016).
"In the 19th century railroads and canals provided both structure and motor
for city development. This role has been taken over today by the global flow
of data and products, as the author argues. Flow of material and
communication is the DNA of contemporary environments. This
development has enormous and partially unfathomable implications for our
city fabric. Logistics networks and their complex structure increasingly bear
upon many urban spheres. Counter trends to the ubiquitous internet retail
trade – to name one of the most palpable phenomena – are gaining
momentum as well, exemplified by the criticism of labor conditions in e-
commerce and the trend to buy regional products from local stores. Lyster
describes the current development and its impact on architecture, landscape
architecture and urbanism: Aspects such as today’s hypermobility of both
products and people have repercussions in design work and create new
paradigms for architecture and urban design. Concepts for the integration of
these new issues are introduced by a number of exemplary urban design
projects."

Keller Easterling, Jesse LeCavalier, and Clare Lyster, “Logistics, Flow,

and Contemporary Urbanism,” Cabinet, November 10, 2016.
Shannon Mattern, “Infrastructural Tourism,” Places Journal (July
2013).
Nicole Starosielski, “Signal Tracks,” Media-N: Journal of the New
Media Caucus 10, no. 1 (Spring 2014); and Lisa Parks and Nicole
Starosielski, eds. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015).
Keller Easterling, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses
in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); Enduring Innocence: Global
Architecture and its Political Masquerades (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2005).
Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space
(New York: Verso, 2014).
Keller Easterling, “Interchange and container: The new orgman,”
Perspecta 30 (1999): 112–121.
Keller Easterling, “Cable.” in New Geographies Vol.1: After Zero
(Cambridge: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2009).
Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, “The Logistical City,” in Transit
Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders no. 3 (August 2011)
Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, and Soenke Zehle, “From Flows of
Culture to the Circuits of Logistics: Borders, Regions, Labour in
Transit” Transit Labor 2 (2010).
Dara Orenstein, “Foreign-​Trade​ Zones​ and ​the ​Cultural ​Logic of ​-
Frictionless ​Production,” Radical History Review 109 (Winter 2011).
“The FTZ as Device,” Southwest Corridor Northwest Passage (2014)
Rozalinda Borcila, “Riding the Zone,” Deep Routes: The Midwest in all
Directions (2015).
Ingrid Burrington, “The Cloud is Not the Territory” Waging
Nonviolience (May 20, 2014).
Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual
Review of Anthropology 42 (October 2013): 327-343.
Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American
Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (November 1999): 377-391.
Markus Hesse, The City as a Terminal: The Urban Context of Logistics
and Freight Transport (London, Routledge, 2016).

Histories of Infrastructures
Paul N. Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and
Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems,” in
Modernity and Technology, eds. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and
Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 185-226.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010 [1934]).
David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New
Technology, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) and American
Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

Consumers and Consumption

“In the new predominance of an organized market,” Raymond
Williams wrote, “the acts of making and of using goods and services
were newly defined in the increasingly abstract pairings of producer
and consumer, production and consumption.” The term, once meant
in “an unfavourable sense”—”to destroy, to use up, to waste, to
exhaust,” has become the identity through which the supply chain is
approached—an abstract relationship from which to view an
abstraction.

Brett Neilson, “Beyond Kulturkritik: Along the Supply Chain of

Contemporary Capitalism”, Culture Unbound 6 (2014): 77–93.
Dara O’Rourke, Shopping for Good (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).
Daniel Miller, A theory of shopping (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
Daniel Miller, “Consumption,” in Handbook of Material Culture, eds.
Mike Rowlands, Christopher Tilley, Patricia Spyer, Webb Keane,
Susanne Küchler (London: Sage, 2006), 341-354.
Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, Commodity Activism:
Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (New York: New York
University Press, 2012).
Roopali Mukherjee, “Diamonds (are from Sierra Leone): Bling and
the Promises of Consumer Citizenship,” in Commodity Activism:
Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, eds. Roopali Mukherjee and
Sarah Banet-Weiser (New York: New York University Press, 2012),
114-133.
Altha Cravey, “Students and the Anti-Sweatshop Movement,”
Antipode 36. (2004): 203-208.
Abigail Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, “Palestinian Resistance and
International Solidarity: the BDS Campaign,” Race and Class 51, no. 1
(2009): 29-54.
Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke, Alice Malpass, “Consuming
Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical
Consumption,” Antipode 37, no.1 (2005): 23–45.
Nick Clarke, “From Ethical Consumerism to Political
Consumption,” Geography Compass 2, no. 6 (2008): 1870-1884.
Hiedi Zimmerman, “Becoming Ethical: Mediated Pedagogies of
Global Consumer Citizenship,” Journal of Consumer Culture (2017): 1-
18.
Iris Young, “Responsibility and Global Labour Justice,” The Journal of
Political Philosophy 12, no. 4 (2004): 365–388.
Stephen Duncombe, “It stands on its head: Commodity fetishism,
consumer activism, and the strategic use of fantasy,” Culture &
Organization 18, no. 5 (2012): 359-375.
Veronica Redini, “Commodity Fetishism Again. Labour, Subjectivity
and Commodities in ‘Supply Chains Capitalism,'” Open Cultural
Studies 2, no. 1 (2018): 353–362.

Retail and Commerce

Joseph Turow, The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your
Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2017).
Nicola Twilley, “What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With
Global Warming?,” New York Times (2014).
"Despite the expansion in frozen foods and refrigerators, the critical
growth area is what’s known in the logistics business as the “cold chain” —
the seamless network of temperature-controlled space through which
perishable food is supposed to travel on its way from farm to refrigerator.
In the United States, at least 70 percent of all the food we eat each year
passes through a cold chain. By contrast, in China, less than a quarter of the
country’s meat supply is slaughtered, transported, stored or sold under
refrigeration. The equivalent number for fruit and vegetables is just 5
percent."

Heather Paxson, “The Art of the Monger,” LIMN 4: Food

 Infrastructures (May 2014).
Dan Williams, “Christmas in Yiwu” (November 19, 2014).
I heard my first Christmas music of the year in District 1. It was the 1st of
August, 27°C outside and All I Want For Christmas was drifting out of a
market stall dedicated to selling Santa hats. Neighbouring booths were
were filled with artificial Christmas trees, baubles and Christmas stockings.
More than half of the world's Christmas decorations come from here.

Tim Maughan, “Yiwu: The Chinese City Where Christmas is

Made and Sold,” BBC Future (December 14, 2014).
Michael Andreae, Jinn-yuh Hsu, Glen Norcliffea, “Performing the
Trade Show: the Case of the Taipei International Cycle Show,”
Geoforum 49 (2013): 193-201.

Maintenance and Repair

Lara Houston, “The Timeliness of Repair,” Continent. Issue 6.1
(2017).
Jason Farman, “Repair and Software: Updates, Obsolescence, and
Mobile Culture’s Operating Systems,” Continent. Issue 6.1 (2017).
Lisa Parks, “Media Fixes: Thoughts on Repair Cultures,” Flow
Journal (2013).

Reference Materials
One requirement for the critical study of logistics is a well-founded
knowledge of its constitution. With that in mind, this section
presents a brief look at materials related to its contemporary
operation.

Logistics Textbooks
Edward Frazelle, Supply Chain Strategy (New York: McGraw-Hill,
2001).
Graham Sharman, “The Rediscovery of Logistics,” Harvard Business
Review 62, no. 5 (1984): 71–79.
Donald J. Bowersox, David J. Closs, M. Bixby Cooper, Supply Chain
Logistics Management (New York: McGraw Hill, 2007).
J. R. Tony Arnold, Stephen N. Chapman, Lloyd M. Clive,
Introduction To Materials Management (London: Pearson, 2011).

Logistical Regulations
This section presents a (small) sample of various reports and
regulations that address the impacts of global logistics.

Reports and Representations

Global Witness, “Faced With a Gun, What Can You Do?” (July 31,
2009).
Global Witness, “A Rough Trade: The Role of Companies and
Governments in the Angolan Conflict” (December 1998).
Greenpeace, “Poisoning the Pearl: An Investigation into Industrial
Water Pollution in the Pearl River Delta” (January 2010).
Greenpeace, “Dirty Laundry: Unravelling the Corporate
Connections to Toxic Water Pollution in China” (July 2011) and
“Dirty Laundry 2: Hung Out of Dry, Unravelling the Toxic Trail from
Pipes to Products” (August 2011).
SACOM, “Unveiling The Labour Rights Violations: The Second
Investigative Report on UNIQLO’s Suppliers in China,” (November
2015).
Sarah Labowitz and Dorothée Baumann-Pauly, “Business as Usual is
Not an Option: Supply Chains and Sourcing after Rana Plaza,” NYU
Stern, Center for Business and Human Rights (April 2014).
John Prendergast and Sasha Lezhnev, “From Mine to Mobile Phone:
The Conflict Minerals Supply Chain,” The Enough Project (November
2009).
Friends of the Earth, “Mining for Smartphones: The True Cost of
Tin” (November 2012).
Free the Slaves, “The Congo Report: Slavery in Conflict Minerals”
(June 2011).
SOMO, “Cobalt Blues: Environmental Pollution and Human Rights
Violations in Katanga’s Copper and Cobalt Mines” (April 2016).
Friends of Nature et al., “The Other Side of Apple” (January 2011)
and “The Other Side of Apple II” (August 2011).
FinnWatch, SACOM, and SOMO, “Playing with Labour Rights:
Music Player and Game Console Manufacturing in China” (March
2009)
FinnWatch, “Legal and Illegal Blurred: Update on Tin Production
for Consumer Electronics in Indonesia” (June 2009).
The Institute of Contemporary Observation, FinnWatch, Finnish
RCA, “Day and Night at the Factory: Working Conditions of
Temporary Workers in the Factories of Nokia and its Suppliers in
Southern China” (March 2005).
United States Government Accountability Office, Report to the
Committee on Aamed Services, US Senate, DOD Supply Chain,
“Suspect Counterfeit Electronic Parts Can Be Found on Internet
Purchasing Platforms,” GAO-12-375 (February 2012).
World Economy, Ecology, and Development et al., “The Dark Side of
Cyberspace: Inside the Sweatshops of China’s Computer Hardware
Production” (December 2008).
IIED, Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development “Global
Report on Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (January 2002).
Amnesty International, “’This is What we die for’: Human Rights
Abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Power the Global
Trade in Cobolt” (2016).
Underwriters Laboratories, “The Life Cycle of Materials in Mobile
Phones” (2011).

Law and Orders

The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, “KPCS Core Document,”
and H.R.1584: “Clean Diamond Trade Act” (2003).
"The Kimberley Process started when Southern African diamond-producing
states met in Kimberley, South Africa, in May 2000, to discuss ways to stop
the trade in ‘conflict diamonds' and ensure that diamond purchases were not
financing violence by rebel movements and their allies seeking to undermine
legitimate governments."

Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010,

“Conflict Minerals Rule.”
"In 2010, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, which directs the
Commission to issue rules requiring certain companies to disclose their use
of conflict minerals if those minerals are “necessary to the functionality or
production of a product” manufactured by those companies. Under the Act,
those minerals include tantalum, tin, gold or tungsten. Congress enacted
Section 1502 of the Act because of concerns that the exploitation and trade
of conflict minerals by armed groups is helping to finance conflict in the
DRC region and is contributing to an emergency humanitarian crisis."

Lynnley Browning, “Companies Struggle to Comply with Rules on

Conflict Minerals,” New York Times (September 7, 2015).
Executive Order on “Strengthening Protections Against Trafficking
In Persons In Federal Contracts” (September 25, 2012) and the State
Department Report “Strengthening Protections Against Trafficking
in Persons in Federal and Corporate Supply Chains.”
“ILO Conventions and Recommendations on Child Labour.”
Global Reporting Initiative, “Mining and Metals Supplement” and
“Introducing the GRI Sustainability Reporting Process: A ‘How-to’
Handbook for all G4 Reporters.”
“Modern Slavery Act of 2015” (UK).
“California Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010” and the
corresponding resource guide published in 2015.
H.R.4842: “Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and
Slavery Act of 2014” (Introduced 2014).

Logistics in Media
This section presents representations of logistics in documentaries,
cinema, games, literature, and art.

Logistical Documentaries
Allan Sekula, The Forgotten Space (2010); 112 minutes.
"The Forgotten Space follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains
and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those
marginalized by the global transport system. We visit displaced farmers and
villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles,
seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory
workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle.
And in Bilbao, we discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief
that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somehow obsolete."

Alberto Toscano, “The Mirror of Circulation: Allan Sekula and the

Logistical Image” Society and Space (July 2018).
Jennifer Burris, “Material Resistance: Allan Sekula’s Forgotten
Space.” Afterall (June 24, 2011).
Lucy Raven, China Town (2009); 51 minutes.
"China Town traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in
Nevada to a smelter in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be
smelted and refined. Considering what it actually means to “be wired” and in
turn, to be connected, in today’s global economic system, the video follows
the detailed production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire—in
this case, the literal digging of a hole to China—and the generation of waste
and of power that grows in both countries as byproduct."

Steve McQueen, Gravesend (2007); 17 minutes.

"The film Gravesend uses a documentary approach to focus on the mining
of coltan, employed in the manufacture of cell phones, laptops and other
high-tech apparatus. The film cuts between two sites: a technological, highly
automated industrial plant in the West where the precious metal is processed
for the final production of microelectronic parts, and the central Congo,
where miners use simple shovels or their bare hands to extract, wash and
collect the ore on leaves. In the Congo, the dirt and clumps of ore are barely
distinguishable, while in the industrialized West, the metal is weighed in
minute milligrams and cast in antiseptic surroundings."

Natasha Raheja, Cast in India (2014); 26 minutes, Bengali and Hindi

with English subtitles.
"Iconic and ubiquitous, thousands of manhole covers dot the streets of New
York City. Enlivening the everyday objects around us, this short documentary
is a glimpse of the working lives of the men behind the manhole covers in
New York City."

Michael Cot Shipbreakers (2004); 73 minutes. // via

"Shipbreakers takes the viewer into the heart of Alang, India, a vibrant
shantytown where 40,000 people live and work in the most primitive
conditions. Since the early '80s, the rusting hulks of thousands of the world's
largest ships have been driven onto the remote beaches of Alang, off the
Arabian Sea, to be dismantled, piece by piece. Sold for scrap, the ship owners
rarely bother to abide by the UN Basel Convention, which bans shipments of
transboundary waste. One worker a day, on average, dies on the job, some
from explosions or falls, but many will contract cancers caused by asbestos,
PCBs and other toxic substances."

Jennifer Baichwal, Manufactured Landscapes (2006); 90 minutes.

"This documentary reveals the gritty underside of industrial landscapes.
Photographer Edward Burtynsky explores the subtle beauty amid the waste
generated by slag heaps, dumps and factories. Memorable scenes include a
Chinese iron factory where employees are berated to produce faster, and
shots of children playing atop piles of dangerous debris. The contrasts
between wealth and poverty are most striking in Shanghai, with new high-
rises towering above old slums."

David Redmon, Mardi Gras: Made in China (2005); 74 minutes.

"The life cycle of plastic beads is traced from their manufacture at a Fuzhou,
China, manufacturing facility to their extensive use by revelers at the annual
Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans. Documentary filmmaker David
Redmon investigates the low wages and substandard conditions endured by
the factory's workers, many of whom are young women. Candid interviews
with both the Chinese workers and the Mardi Gras crowd reveal the vast
economic and cultural chasm between the two."

Garrett Bradley, Like (2016); 9 minutes.

"A short documentary about clickfarmers in Dhaka."

Denis Delestrac, Freightened: The Real Price of Shipping (2016); 90

minutes.
"In an audacious investigation, Freightened will reveal the mechanics and
perils of freight shipment; an all-but-visible industry that holds the key to our
economy, our environment and the very model of our civilisation."

Frank Piasechi Poulsen, Blood in the Mobile (2010); 83 minutes.

"The dark side of our cell phones. No company can say for sure that they
didn't buy conflict minerals from the Congo to produce your cell phone."

Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson, Logistics Art Project

(2012); 53280 minutes.
"A 37 day-long road movie in the true sense of the meaning. The work is
about Time and Consumption. It brings to the fore what is often forgotten in
our digital, ostensibly fast-paced world: the slow, physical freight
transportation that underpins our economic reality. We wanted to convey it
in the most direct manner possible in order to share the journey with others.
That's why we recorded the journey in real time and screen it in real time. 37
days and 37 nights, nonstop."

See also the work of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, especially:

Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, Manakamana (2013), 118 minutes;
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, Leviathan (2012), 87
minutes; and Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, Sweetgrass
(2009), 101 minutes.

Logistics in Cinema
For Marshall McLuhan, cinema was an assembly line comprised “of
still shots on celluloid,” where mechanical movement and the
projection of light came together to create the “illusion” of motion.
Paul Virilio suggested that it was this quality that allowed cinema to
“get away from the static focus and share the speed of moving
objects.” Cinema operated in logistical space, with “fragments”
assembled in “non-sensory order.” Not in products, but in montage.
Cinematic images are powerful, he explains, because, now, “to move
was to produce.” Despite this suggestive overlap, logistical
operations have themselves rarely been cinematic subjects—though
in television Mary Tyler Moore spinoff Lou Grant famously opened
with the lifecycle of newspaper production, from the falling of
timber to an ignominious end as birdcage liner. More often, the
logistical labor of the supply chain is largely a backdrop for other
human dramas.

Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer (2008).

William Friedkin, Sorcerer (1977).
Steven Soderbergh, Traffic (2000).
Ridley Scott, Alien (1979).
Robert Zemeckis, Castaway (2000).
Edward Zwick, Blood Diamond (2006).
Andrew Niccol, Lord of War (2005).
Terry Gilliam, Brazil (1985).
Alfred Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train (1951)

Logistical Games
“Congratulations! By the virtue of owning SimCity 2000 you are
hereby proclaimed Mayor of a million cities and ruler of a billion
simulated lives (your Sims). It’s a tough game, but somebody’s gotta
play it.” —SimCity 2000, user manual.

SimCity (1989)
"SimCity is the first of a new type of entertainment/education software,
called SYSTEM SIMULATIONS. We provide you with a set of RULES and
TOOLS that describe, create and control a system. In the case of SimCity
the system is a city."

A-Train (1985)
"A-Train is a simulation game built upon trains and railroad management—
but that's just the beginning! A-Train exemplifies the relationships between
transportation, business, and city development."
OpenTTD (2004-)
"OpenTTD is a business simulation game in which players try to earn
money via transporting passengers and freight by road, rail, water and air. It is
an open source remake and expansion of the 1995 Chris Sawyer video game
Transport Tycoon Deluxe."

Cargonauts (2015)
"Part of the _Logistical Worlds_ Project, Cargonauts envisions a logistical
world of infrastructure, of transport economies, of zones and concessions, of
nocturnal possibilities for sabotage and revenge."

Phone Story (2011)

"Phone Story is an educational game about the dark side of your favorite
smart phone. Follow your phone's journey around the world and fight the
market forces in a spiral of planned obsolescence."

TransOcean (2014)
"TransOcean – The Shipping Company is your ticket to the world of
gigantic ships and transnational transport empires. Build a mighty fleet of
modern merchant ships and conquer the seven seas. Track your routes and
real time, take the controls as ships enter and leave the harbor, and see to it
that freight gets loaded efficiently. Keep in mind that time is money!"

See also Ned Rossiter, “Logistical worlds,” Cultural Studies Review

20, no. 1 (2014): 53–76.

Logistical Art
“What one sees in a harbor is the concrete movement of goods. This
movement can be explained in its totality only through recourse to
abstraction. Marx tells us this, even if no one is listening anymore. If
the stock market is the site in which the abstract character of money
rules, the harbor is the site in which material goods appear in bulk,
in the very flux of exchange. Use values slide by in the channel; the
Ark is no longer a bestiary but an encyclopedia of trade and industry.
This is the reason for the antique mercantilist charm of harbors. But
the more regularized, literally container-ized, the movement of
goods in harbors, that is, the more rationalized and automated, the
more the harbor comes to resemble the stock market. A crucial
phenomenological point here is the suppression of smell. Goods that
once reeked—guano, gypsum, steamed tuna, hemp, molasses—now
flow or are boxed. The boxes, viewed in vertical elevation, have the
proportions of slightly elongated banknotes. The contents
anonymous: electronic components, the worldly belongings of
military dependents, cocaine, scrap paper (who could know?) hidden
behind the corrugated sheet steel walls emblazoned with the logos of
the global shipping corporations: Evergreen, Matson, American
President, Mitsui, Hanjin, Hyundai.” — Allan Sekula, Fish Story.

Allan Sekula, Fish Story, (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2002).

Gabby Miller, “Turquoise Wake“, 2015, Oakland, Random Parts
Pieter Hugo, Permanent Error (London: Prestel, 2011) and a review by
Sean O’Toole, “Permanent Error,” Mahala (May 2011). // via
"In his previous volumes of photographs, Hugo offers unflinching yet
striking portraits of humans, animals, societies, and landscapes that shock
and disturb, but also demand our attention. In Permanent Error, he
documents a garbage dump in Ghana that has become the repository for
discarded computers from around the world."

A. Laurie Palmer, In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material

Extraction (New York: Black Dog, 2015).
"In the Aura of a Hole focuses on a decade long project Palmer undertook as
an extended exploration of mineral extraction sites in the U.S, which through
her narration of a first person perspective, discusses themes of the raw
scientific and mechanical aspects of the industry."

Michael Shane Boyle, “Container Aesthetics: The Infrastructural

Politics of Shunt’s ‘The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face’,”
Theatre Journal 68, no. 1 (March 2016): 57-77.
Chen HangFeng, Santa’s Little Helpers (2007); 9 minute video
installation.
The video is shot in a small village in Zhejiang Province, (China) where 50%
of the world’s Christmas decorations are made by hand. The family
workshops were doing the ornaments all year along and the landscape had
been littered with garbage. The video has been edited into a 9-minute video
and screened it inside a small wooden box wrapped like a Christmas present,
people only can see the secret from a small peep whole on the box.

Lonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren De Haan, Monument Of Sugar:

How to Use Artistic Means to Avoid Barriers (2007); 67 minute video
installation. // via
"Upon learning that most of Europe’s beet sugar today is consumed outside
its borders, the artists devised a plan that began with purchase of that same
sugar at a fraction of its domestic price. From there, they set out for Nigeria,
a nation which, despite a climate wholly conducive to sugarcane cultivation,
was said to be the largest importer of European sugar. Van Brummelen and de
Haan’s idea was to transform that raw material into art and reimport it for an
exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum."

Logistics in Literature
To suggest, as Sam Halliday does, Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel as
one of the “logistical sublime,” is to recognize its peculiarly modern
fascination with time. “Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May,” the first
line reads, “arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have
arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late.” As a result of the
encounter, Halliday notes, Harker’s interest in “the correct time” will
become a near-obsession. Indeed, Dracula is a sequence of events,
near misses, and long delays punctuated by sudden collisions. Like
the examples below, it is a story of the mediation of movement in
space and time, of storage and transmission in sites both
recognizably logistical and not.

Bram Stoker, Dracula (1887).

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899).
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877).
Joseph Conrad, “An Outpost of Progress” (1897) and Heart of Darkness
(1899).
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851).
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
Philip K. Dick, “Adjustment Team” (1954), Time Out of Joint (1959),
and many others.
Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder” (1952), “The Toynbee
Convector” (1984), and many others.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957).
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Lottery in Babylon” (1962; in English).
William Burroughs, Nova Express, 1964
William Gibson, “Johnny Mnemonic” (1986).
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Sur” (1982), Changing Planes (2003), and many
others.
Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (1993).
Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before (1994).
Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000).
Ted Chiang, “Tower of Babylon” (1990).
Paolo Bacigalupi, “The People of Sand and Slag” (2004).
China Miéville, Iron Council (2004), The City & the City (2009).
 See also Kate Marshall, Corridor: Media Architectures in American
Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Critical Logistics Community

This section, broadly speaking, collates the work of scholars, artists,
and activists engaged with the critical study of logistics.

Special Issues on Logistics

Charmaine Chua, Martin Danyluk, Deborah Cowen, Laleh Khalili,
“Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with
Logistics,” Society and Space 36, no. 4 (August 2018).
Cabinet 47: Logistics (Fall 2012).
"Every time you put a letter in the mail, every time you stop at a traffic light,
a complex—and usually invisible—network of logistics is at work. This issue
also features James Whittington on the diaries of Dmitri Pavlov; Jacqueline
Bochner on the harmonization of international postal systems; Daniella
Stone on the logistics of the hospital kitchen; and a travelogue from the
Cabinet 'Hand-Delivered Issue Road Trip.' Elsewhere in the issue: Rasha
Salti on intrigue and celebrity in the bar of Beirut’s Phoenicia Hotel; Jeffrey
Kastner on saintly 'incorruptibles'; and Will Wiles on Bill Phillips’
“MONIAC,” a device that models the national economy using the flow of
liquids."

“Logistics of Power” in Viewpoint Magazine, no. 4 (“The State”)

(September-October 2014).
Patrick Brodie, Lisa Han, Weixian Pan, “Becoming Environmental:
Media, Logistics, and Ecological Change,” Synoptique 8, no. 1 (2019)
“Logout! Worker Restance Within and Against the Platform
Economy,” Notes From Below 7 (June 2019).
Syllabi and Conferences
“Supply and Command: Encoding Logistics, Labor, and the
Mediation of Making,” _New York University (April 19th-20th,
2018).
“The Global Social Factory and Supply Chains,” The Public School
(2012).
“Cold Logics, Cold Logistics,” Benjamin Noys, Accelerationism and
Aesthetics Seminar, Konstfack CuratorLab (2016).
“Turbulent Circulation / Toward a Critical Logistics,” University of
Toronto (October 9-11, 2015).
“The Arts of Logistics,” Aylwyn Mae Walsh and Michael Shane
Boyle (organizers), Queen Mary University of London (June 3-4,
2016).
“Unpacking Organization. Cybernetics, Logistics, and the Labour of
Circulation,” Cent​re for Di​gi​tal Cul​tu​res (CDC), af​fi​lia​ted to Leu​-
pha​na Uni​ver​si​ty of Lüne​burg (June 19, 2016)
“Logistics of soft control: SAP, labour, organization,” Leuphana
University, Lüneburg (June 20-21, 2013).
“Logistical Nightmares,” The Centre for Research Architecture,
Goldsmiths, University of London / Sonic Arts (2017-2018)
Charmaine Chua, “Reading Guide for Logistics“, Période (in French;
2019).
followthethings Reading Lists (2017-2018).
Alice Marwick, “Networked Societies” (Amazon Focused; Spring
2019).

Projects and Groups

Logistical Worlds: Infrastructure, Software, Labour
"How to study China-led globalisation through infrastructural
interventions? This question prompts the investigation of logistical
operations that fabricate the emerging trade network known as the New Silk
Road. Moving between software studies and geocultural analysis of labour
regimes, the project tracks algorithmic arrangements of power across the
tricontinental sites of Piraeus, Valparaíso and Kolkata... Subjectivity and
labour expose the power and vulnerability of logistical worlds."

Empire Logistics
"Empire Logistics is an interactive mapping project begun in 2009. As a
collaborative initiative, Empire Logistics maps the global supply chain
through research that articulates the infrastructure and 'externalized costs'—
human, economic, social and environmental—of the international flow of
things."

Center for Land Use Interpretation

"The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research and education
organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human
interaction with the surface of the earth, and in finding new meanings in the
intentional and incidental forms that we individually and collectively create.
We believe that the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription, that can be
read to better understand who we are, and what we are doing."

Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders

"Transit-labour investigates changing patterns of labour and mobility in the
whirlwind of Asian capitalist transformation. Mindful of the view of Asia as
the world's factory, this three year research project examines the role of
creativity, invention and knowledge production in the new economic order
being forged from the region's capitalist centres. Particular attention is given
to changing relations of culture and economy in this transition and their
entanglement with the production of new subjectivities and modalities of
labour."

followthethings.com
"followthethings.com is a website designed to have the look, feel and
navigation of a familiar online store. But it’s stocked with research examining
films, art, activist and other work that encourages shoppers to critically
consider their relationships with those who make the things that they buy. Its
purpose is to encourage careful thought and lively conversation about trade
(in)justice, and to encourage and inform new work in this genre of
commodity activism."

The Story of Stuff Project

"We have a problem with Stuff. We use too much, too much of it is toxic and
we don’t share it very well. But that’s not the way things have to be. Together,
we can build a society based on better not more, sharing not selfishness,
community not division."

Unknown Fields Division

"The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design research studio that
ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to bear witness to
alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious
wilderness. These distant landscapes - the iconic and the ignored, the
excavated, irradiated and the pristine, are embedded in global systems that
connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives. In
such a landscape of interwoven narratives, the studio uses film and animation
to chronicle this network of hidden stories and re-imagine the complex and
contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary
futures."

The Infrastructure Observatory

"The Infrastructure Observatory is a community devoted to exploring and
celebrating the infrastructural landscape. Our mission is to render visible the
oft-invisible guts of modern life, and foster chapters of enthusiasts around
these structures throughout the world. IO is mostly involved in organizing
field trips to infrastructure sites"

Warehouse Workers for Justice

"Warehouse Workers for Justice is a worker center founded in 2009 to win
stable, living wage jobs with dignity for the hundreds of thousands of workers
in Illinois' logistics and distribution industry. We provide workshops so
warehouse workers can educate themselves about workplace rights, unite
warehouse workers to defend their rights on the job, build community
support for the struggles of warehouse workers and fight for policy changes
to improve the lives of warehouse workers and members of our
communities."

Sinews of War and Trade

"Sinews of War and Trade is part of the ‘Military Mobilities and Mobilising
Movements in the Middle East’ project based at the Politics and
International Studies department, SOAS University of London."

Broader Advocacy
Global Witness
"Many of the world’s worst environmental and human rights abuses are
driven by the exploitation of natural resources and corruption in the global
political and economic system. Global Witness is campaigning to end this by
carrying out hard-hitting investigations, exposing these abuses, and
campaigning for change. They are independent, not-for-profit, and work with
partners around the world in the fight for justice."

The Enough Project

"The Enough Project seeks to build leverage for peace and justice in Africa
by helping to create real consequences for the perpetrators and facilitators of
genocide and other mass atrocities. Enough aims to counter rights-abusing
armed groups and violent kleptocratic regimes that are fueled by grand
corruption, transnational crime and terror, and the pillaging and trafficking
of minerals, ivory, diamonds, and other natural resources. Enough conducts
field research in conflict zones, develops and advocates for policy
recommendations, supports social movements in affected countries, and
mobilizes public campaigns."
Logistical Praxis
The critical study of logistics often conincides with the practical
operation of unraveling logistical operations. This section presents a
growing list of tools and methodologies that facilitate this process.

Reverse Sourcing
The Kit – Supply Chain and Product Investigations
"The Kit is a collaborative, self-learning resource that makes investigative
techniques and tools used by experienced investigators more accessible to
people and communities who feel motivated to start their own investigations,
collect and verify information, build evidence and create a better
understanding of issues without losing sight of ethical or safety
considerations. The Kit is a resource of Exposing the Invisible (ETI). This
resource provides an introduction to supply chain investigations including an
overview of the main tools, techniques, data resources and essential
precautions to take. It focuses on the main actors, stages and processes of a
supply chain and includes a hypothetical step-by-step investigation. These
materials supplement existing resource pages on Maritime Shipping, Human
Trafficking and Slavery, Extractive Industries, and Corruption."

Global Investigative Journalism Network Supply Chain Database

"Exposing 'supply chains' — the connections between the products we buy
and the circumstances of their creation — has proved to be fertile ground for
investigative journalism. In seeking to understand the origins of our food, raw
materials and manufactured goods, reporters have uncovered slavery,
environmental crimes, corruption and human rights abuses. In this GIJN
resource page, we identify the investigative tools used for tracking the supply
chains that link farms, oceans, mines and factories with the end products we
buy."

Tim Hwang and Craid Cannon, The Container Guide (San Francisco:
Infrastructure Observatory Press, 2015).
Supply Studies is a site for writing on logistics, supply chains, and
our global assemblies of assembly.

Matthew Hockenberry (PhD, Department of Media, Culture, and

Communication, New York University) is a media historian and
theorist whose work examines the media of global production. His
work develops the media history of logistics, exploring critical
developments in the epistemology of assembly by tracing how media
forms shape the emergence of logistical production and distribution
in the past, present, and future.
© 2020 Supply Studies Up ↑