Short Abstract

Departing from anthropological insights on circulation, as well as analyses of struggles over logistics sites, infrastructures, and labour, this panel examines the importance of aesthetics, co-creation and participatory methods to propose new futures for and beyond logistics.

Long Abstract

Anthropology has examined circulation through sites of logistics, but also as a theoretical key-concept and as methodological strategy, and has, over the past decade, captured complex responses to a ‘logistics revolution’, characterised by ‘Just-in-time’- manufacturing, containerization, automatization, new information technologies and platform models. The field has highlighted how apparently seamless flows and circulation of goods, as well as smart technological and spatial calculations, are often paired with casualisation of labour, environmental disruption and platformisation of economic and social influence.

In/visibility constitutes a particularly important theme in anthropological studies of shipping, roads, gig work or algorithms, suggesting collaborative and emerging research methods attentive to how logistics, labour, and infrastructure are seen, sensed, and represented. In this panel we discuss the possibility that aesthetics is not peripheral, but fundamental, to shaping public imaginaries, legal negotiations, and local responses to the rapid reorganisation of land, sea, information, labour and communities. This panel encourages the expansion of these discussions towards elaborations and illustrations of how participatory and co-creative practices bridge oppositions between, for instance, the blockade and the violence of circulation, or dis-engagement and institutional conflict. We invite contributions that span across ethnographic and participatory co-creative methods (including counter-mapping, visual art, documentary, fiction/poetry and performative practices), and to understand the specific aesthetics of logistics, but also to engage in questions of collectivity, reciprocity, participation and co-production in countering aesthetics.

We further invite responses to a panel that will investigate:

How are logistics labour or infrastructures narrated, as popular and cultural practices, and what are the interventions that researchers and artists can contribute to challenge taken-for-granted and polarised speculations about new futures in, for, and beyond logistics?

How can we understand the spatial and aesthetic components of logistics and how can mapping, collective viewings and non-extractivist forms of research and art be developed?

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