"Into the Black Box" - Logistics & Labor Struggles

Our next events in the Social Movements Lab are on "Into the Black Box," a collective research project about logistics, spaces, and labor struggles.

We will have a 'mapping' session on Wed., 10/31, 12pm, and a 'dialogue' session on Mon., 11/5, 12pm.

Into the Black Box is a project of multidisciplinary and collective research that adopts logistics as a point of view on contemporary political, economic and social transformations. It started with a research project by some PhD scholars of the University of Bologna on supply chain development and conflicts in North Italy; the output of this work has been presented during the Berlin summer school "Teaching the Crisis" in September 2013. We conceive logistics not simply as commodities circulation, but rather as a whole biopolitical apparatus that performs spaces, subjects and powers. The black box is the symbol of contemporary management techniques and devices that hide the whole logic of the system to external viewers. Similar boxes are all around us: in platform capitalism, in urban planning, in labour organisation, in State governance. A way to penetrate the opacity of the system is to analyse inputs and outputs, operations and consequences, procedures and resistances.

For more info and readings, please see: https://sites.fhi.duke.edu/socialmovementslab/event/logistics-and-labor-movements-mapping-session-10-31-dialogue-11-5/