October 1 event Logistics, Labor, and the Struggle Against Amazon, a public talk by Professor Charmaine Chua co-organised with the Independent School for the City in Rotterdam. We think this event could be of interest to colleagues working on questions around gig/platform work and worker justice, as well as people working on questions of urbanisation and its relation to logistics and transportation systems as they extend beyond the city, or for anyone interested in questions of labour, race, and social inequality more broadly.
- Date
- Tuesday 1 Oct 2024, 18:30 - 20:30
- Type
- General
- Spoken Language
- English
- Location
Independent School for the City, Delftsestraat 33 III, Rotterdam
- Ticket information
Free entrance, but registration is required.
- More information
Organisation: DIGIPORTS
About the event
Charmaine Chua will give a talk titled The City as Supply Chain: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence, and Urban Futures, in which she maps Los Angeles as an example of a logistical city. Starting at the port then proceeding inland to Amazon warehouses, the talk will show how the spatial geographies of supply chain capitalism shape the class composition of American working classes and why Amazon has become a central engine of "job growth" in these deindustrialized hinterlands. While centered around LA, the talk will also invite comparisons to Rotterdam, with its port and hinterlands forming a vast logistical landscape.
About Professor Chua
Charmaine Chua is a Singaporean organizer and writer, and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interdisciplinary scholarly and political work is interested in how planetary networks of production and distribution shape the organization of racialized and class divisions within capitalist social formations, with particular attention to how these divisions are lived, contested, and overcome across anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist social movements. She is currently writing two books, The Logistics Counterrevolution: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence and the Transpacific Empire of Capital, and How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class (co-authored with Spencer Cox). Her work has been published in The Review of International Studies, The Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, Society and Space, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Jacobin, among other venues. She co-founded the Marxist Institute of Research and organizes with Cops off Campus and Amazonians United, an independent union of Amazon warehouse workers. She was named a 2023 Freedom Scholar and is the 2023-24 winner of the UCSB Plous Award.
