Container shipping has implications for everyone who has ever shopped in a store or online. Shipping is the backbone of the global economy. 90% of the world's goods travel by ship. The industry has a global reach and a highly diverse workforce. It is also structured by workers' nationalities, resulting in inequalities. Inequalities occur within ships, where some European workers systematically receive higher wages, and between regions, where labour conditions vary.
Shipping is currently undergoing rapid changes as it digitalizes its workflows. It is unknown if digitalisation will help or hinder worker equality, or for which groups. Technology can increase workers' skills and make travel safer. Yet the benefits may only extend to some, while others face difficulties becoming skilled or could lose their jobs altogether. In maritime shipping, pay and working conditions are structured by nationality. So, digitalisation will likely also affect the racialisation of workers, or how practices and ideas about race are constructed and employed, and related inequalities.
DIGIPORTS is the first ethnographic study of the digitalisation of shipping. It will provide an integrated analysis of how digitalisation reshapes labour and racial inequalities. This project innovatively combines critical logistics and algorithm studies. We will study the on-the-ground implementation of digital infrastructures to better understand how it is reconfiguring four processes of racialisation: the displacement, classification, potential for criminalisation, and related precarity of workers. The Digiports team will develop a four-part framework for studying how racialisation operates systematically through institutionalised practices and infrastructures that extend across space and time. It will also lay the groundwork for the new interdisciplinary field of digital logistics studies.
