About the talk:

The rise of the global logistics industry has fundamentally reshaped global supply chains by organizing goods movement through a politics of just-in-time circulation. Although scholars have often dubbed this phenomenon "the revolution in logistics," in this talk Chua argues that the so-called 'logistics revolution' is better understood as a counter-revolution. As such, studying logistics from the "third world' illuminates that contemporary supply chains are not only concerned with the efficient transport of commodities, but about a demand for social, political, and bodily access to the labor, resources, and geostrategic locations of Asia.

About the speaker:

Charmaine Chua is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching interests are in technologies of globalization, global political economy, infrastructure studies, empire and imperialism, and ocean studies. Chua’s research is concerned with the politics of global circulation: how things move, how movement is regulated, disrupted, or facilitated, and why systems that are supposed to provision life might actually distribute inequality and death. Her first book project, Logistics Leviathan: Circulation, Empire, and the TransPacific supply chain, explores the expansion of US-China commercial trade through the rise of logistics, and demonstrates how just-in-time global supply chains are imperial infrastructures that accelerate and intensify economies of carceral, ecological, and racialized violence in the US, China, and the Asia-Pacific.