Project Title: Emergent Logistics and Experimental Ethnography

“Emergent Logistics and Experimental Ethnography,” explores the problem of methodological engagement with the complex patterns of logistical movement that power the circulation of money and energy globally. Building upon our previous work, “Logistics in the Making of Mobile Worlds,” we aim to expand our Experimental Field School to the diverse geographies of commerce, speculation, finance, energy-production, and distribution. Our project interrogates these processes through sites such as Chicago’s e-commerce facilities, banking firms, and energy plants that power the transportation hubs and data centers of the city, to Delhi’s expansive networks of gasoline and diesel transportation, electric rickshaws, and emerging transition to sustainable energy systems and decarbonization. We plan to cultivate permanent networks of research at the University of Chicago and the UChicago Delhi Center by inviting scholars from around the world to join our Experimental Field Schools, where we will develop methodological approaches to pressing logistical questions through site visits, observation, and collaborative design. 

Biography:
Julie Y. Chu is Associate Professor in UChicago's Anthropology Department and the author Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. She is currently completing a book entitled The Hinge of Time: Chronopolitics and Infrastructure at China’s Global Edge. Based on fieldwork with Chinese migrant couriers and customs inspectors traversing the Taiwan Strait, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific (via ports and border zones spanning the PRC and the U.S.), this work examines how figures of “infrastructure” animate the global politics of time in three distinct keys -- as matters of constancy, rhythm and non/event. Additionally, she is currently developing a new ethnographic focus on the politics and poetics of logistics, especially in relation to e-commerce driven innovations in moving goods, people and information according to the increasing aspirations for on-demand seamless "fulfillment." This includes launching the collaborative research project, “Logistics in the Making of Mobile Worlds,” and co-editing the Spring 2002 issue of Roadsides on #Logistics.