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Paper short abstract:

Shipping is often referred to as an invisible industry, but ship tracking websites show the sea as speckled with dots that crisscross the world. My paper takes ships as human-machines/social assemblages that provide a lens to the changing infrastructure of mobility that connects the global economy.

Paper long abstract:

Shipping has often been referred to as an invisible industry, but on ship tracking websites the sea is speckled with tiny dots that crisscross the world map and converge along defined routes that look like ant-paths. But far from small, these dots represent ships that can be the length of the world's tallest skyscrapers. While the number of people onboard rarely exceed 20 persons, the ships' capacity for carrying goods exceeds our imagination. The largest containerships today can carry up to 20,000 shipping containers. Imagine overtaking 10,000 trucks on a high-way. That would be the cargo of just one fully loaded ship.

My paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork on this invisible industry, and on the life-worlds of the people who live and work inside these moving machines for months on end, forming human-machine assemblages that change over time and have their own stories and life-stories. Infrastructural transformations, such as containerization and the development of specialized ports and terminals have enabled the volume of goods to increase dramatically. These transformations have also had an enormous impact on the everyday lives of the people who work to transport the goods and have changed the nature of their work, their relationships with their ships and with their shipmates.

This paper looks at ships as human-technological assemblages and as social worlds, and takes ships as lenses for looking at transformations of shipping as an infrastructure for mobility that forms the connections of the world that undergird the current global economy.