CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS Workshop series: Sited logistics
Deadline for Submission: 23rd October 2021 Workshop January / February 2022
Description:
This seminar-workshop proposes to bring together PhD and early career researchers working across emerging logistical hubs, with a particular attention to the post-Soviet and post-colonial geographies of global logistics. Imagined as a space of sharing and for thinking together, we are interested in embodied experiences of research that speak to how new regimes of capital accumulation and circulation shape possible futures. If logistics functions, as Deborah Cowen writes, as a gathering of forms of organized violence, how do these intersect with existing histories of place? How are material infrastructures of logistics entangled with histories, politics, communities, and ecologies, and how do these in turn influence the larger circulation of logistics?
In short, what happens, when logistics hits the ground?
Analysing the emergence and making of logistics through feminist epistemologies of situatedness and in dialogue with works on critical logistics and ethnographies of infrastructure, brings to the forefront questions that orient our work and act as sign-posts to the discussions we want to have. These include the following questions;
What articulations of space/time intersect in the emergence of logistics hubs and networks? How do we think of temporary-ness, processes and relationality as modes of being within logistical zones?
What diverse forms of work go into maintaining logistics circulation? What are the processes of negotiation, entanglement and refusal that push against the homogenising nature of logistics development?
How do our embodied experiences within and beyond the field draw the boundaries of our research? How can we write these boundaries, potentialities and limitations into our accounts of logistics?
Structure and submission:
The workshop is intended to be the first of a series of meetings and collaborations between the participants. We hope that those who apply are wanting to build communities of work and sharing.
Structured as a workshop, it will bring together 16 participants and will take place over 4 half days (four consecutive Fridays or fortnightly TBC). We imagine each workshop to be 2 to 2.5 hours, starting from January 2021. Four participants will present at each session followed by a detailed discussion on each presentation. In the month before the workshop, those selected will be asked to circulate an outline of their presentation / some key questions / points they wish to discuss with the other participants.
Through the course of the workshop, we hope to identify common themes across our work that will form the basis for a potential publication.
What we need:
A brief bio, including affiliations and where you are currently based. Brief description of your work and interests. An abstract or description for a presentation addressing how you approach these themes and your questions.
We acknowledge that taking part in events like this takes a lot of work and time and that participation, even in this online format, may be precluded to those of us whose PhDs are not funded, are currently out of employment and/or have caring duties of different kinds. For this reason we have established several bursaries (£150) to pay participants who are not already funded. Please specify in your application if you wish to be allocated one.
Organized by Evelina Gambino (UCL) and Ishita Sharma (TU DELFT) in collaboration with the Topological Atlas
Submissions and queries should be sent to sitedlogistics@gmail.com