Investigating logistics offers a powerful way of confronting the challenges of migration. As a political technology that produces space, power and subjectivity, logistics not only provides a set of technologies and techniques for marshalling the movement of people and things. It also supplies a unique perspective on and an empirical ground for studying transitions of capital and capitalism.
Building on the experience of two previous summer universities – ‘Teaching the Crisis’ (2013) and ‘Expanding the Margins’ (2014) – Investigating Logistics is an intensive program of international scholarly exchange taking place from September 19‐30, 2016 at Humboldt University Berlin that interrogates the infrastructural conditions and constraints of current practices of passage and transit. It convenes MA and PhD‐level students and faculty from multiple disciplinary backgrounds who are invested in empirical research, theoretical inquiry, digital experimentation and political intervention for a research and teaching encounter that explores the barriers and potentialities of logistics for the making of common forms of life.
Questions to be explored include: the ways in which logistics produces and connects heterogeneous spaces, articulating them from the point of view of capital valorization; migration and logistics, both as far as the logistical management of mobility is concerned and as far as the logistical angle allows a conceptualisation of migration and diverse practices of migrating; the increasing logistical mediation of social reproduction and forms of life; the digital as an object and mode of inquiry with respect to logistics and migration; how logistics can (or cannot) be imagined and constructed differently in order to become instrumental to the articulation of the power of social cooperation beyond capital’s domination, including not least towards concepts, imaginaries and practices that might probe ‘commons’.
Investigating Logistics is a summer university supported by the Humboldt University KOSMOS programme and organized through the Berlin Institute for Empirical Migration and Integration Research (BIM), and in cooperation with Leuphana University Lüneburg. Through lectures, workshops, presentations, public events, and by walking the city, the summer university will be a space for the collective production of knowledge on logistics and migration, taken together as an empirical lens and analytical framework in which translocal research can address seemingly global phenomena.
Faculty members include Manuela Bojadžijev (Leuphana University Lüneburg and Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin), Sina Arnold, Serhat Karakayali, Moritz Altenried (Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin ), Isabell Lorey (University of Kassel), Sandro Mezzadra and Giorgio Grappi (University of Bologna), Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter (University of Western Sydney), Michael Hardt (Duke University), Eric Fassin (Paris VIII), Johan Lindquist (Stockholm University) and Dana Diminescu (Telecom Paris Tech).