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Paper short abstract

The gaze of and on seafarers is increasingly mediated by scopic devices. This contribution explores how a rapidly changing system of seeing is critical to the means of long-distance control over seafarers and to the operations of moving oceangoing commercial vessels.

Paper long abstract

While sea-blindness does not (yet) have an entry in any dictionary, it is a pervasive expression that I often came across in my research on seafarers’ labour rights in international commercial shipping. Among the ship managers, social workers, labour inspectors, and trade unionists I job-shadowed in German seaports, “sea blindness” has become one of these rare issues that brings about a consensus. My interlocutors all agree that people ashore are “sea blind” in that they fail to perceive the critical role of seafarers, even though they are highly dependent on their labour for the maintenance of supply chains and the delivery of much-needed commodities. Sea blindness is an emic concept that has been widely adopted by both journalists and critical scholars of logistics in order to shed light on the entrapment of seafarers. They convincingly argue that shipping thrives on hiding its unsightly exploitation.

When sea blindness is invoked, overcoming it is set up as a desired impact. Instead of criticizing the ableist undertone of the term sea blindness, it prompts me to consider the importance of vision and the scope of visualization technologies in shipping. Based on insights from my fieldwork, my contribution engages the notion sea blindness in relation to what I call the “scopic regime of shipping.” I question how the permanent feeding of images between ship and shore mirrors the continuous flow of merchant vessels, and relates to the oversight of seafarers – in the triple sense of surveillance, hypervisibility and oblivion.