Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DIGIPORTS (Digitalized Ports, Racialized Labor: Shifting Infrastructures for Work in Container Shipping)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-09-01 bis 2025-02-28
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.
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.
So far our main achievements are securing access to fieldwork sites, the undertaking of fieldwork especially for subprojects 2 and 4, and the publication of a co-authored volume, among project team members and a university colleague, on the ways that ships have been conceptualized in a number of academic literatures across history, sociology, and anthropology. We also have a number of publications underway, in the drafting stages, on issues like the history of automation and work, digitalization and discrimination, and time in a digitialized society.
In addition to my work examining the past and present legacies of automation in the Port of Rotterdam, I am also drafting a short book for a broader audience that focuses on aplying the ideas developed in Digiports using a novel methodology inspired by the new field of digital logistics that we are developing through the Digiports project. This volume is an outgrowth of my reading in the history of labor negotiations in the port, and engagement with current debates in e.g. a number of port technology conferences where team members have visited over the past two years. During those events I increasingly became aware of the limited positions offerd in broader debates and hope to open up those options to allow for more productive discussions and negotiations of how digitalization will be rolled out in major urban areas and industries. The volume focuses on developing a collaborative exercise or game that allows members of a group to set up and then practice difficult debates over issues like automation and work or the impact of industrial automation in local communities. The how to expand the possibilities for processes to involve local communities in the roll-out of industrial automation, and to conduct more meaningful labor negotiations with a more nuanced and expansive understanding of the possibilities for digitalization in ports and beyond.