Cargomobilities

This unique collection takes us on a fascinating journey through some of the hidden hubs and flows that are the lifeblood of our contemporary world. It shows how cargomobilities generate some of the most challenging social, ethical, economic and political dilemmas of our time. Combining conceptual richness with ethnographic detail, the authors in this collection bring cargomobilities to life like never before. - Dr David Bissell, The Australian National University, Australia Movements of cargo and freight have long been the privileged concerns of economists and logistics experts, with very little understanding of their broader relevance to the social sciences. This exciting new book opens out a new field, providing important studies of the political, social, and spatial implications of cargomobilities. Peter Merriman, Aberystwyth University, UK Circulating in the pervasive networks of a containerized world, this global granular study tracks the movement of the heavy components of digital capital. Nearly everything we consume has been calibrated and synchronized in these logistical landscapes that stretch into and striate both air and sea. - Keller Easterling, Yales School of Architecture, USA The movement of things is central to the working of a modern capitalist world. Mobility adds value. Outside of specialist literature in the field of logistics this middle section of the production-distribution-consumption triad has been the least exposed to critical analysis. This book corrects this oversight and does so much more besides. A stellar collection of essays by leading thinkers in the field of mobilities shines a bright lights into the often invisible, sometimes turbulent, world of the distribution of cargo by sea, land and air. This book is landmark collection for the exciting and never-more-important world of mobility studies. - Tim Cresswell, Professor of History and International Affairs, Northeastern University, Boston, USA. This book is an incredible resource. Offering a dazzling array of insight and analysis, and an impressive collection of authors, Cargomobilities establishes without a doubt that the movement of stuff is one of the most vital - and fascinating - areas of contemporary scholarship. - Deborah Cowen, Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Canada The book offers an expansive and novel set of chapters that consider the intermodal nature of cargo mobility (from sea to land), and also those cargo movements lay beyond shipping altogether (air cargo and virtual cargo). To say this book matters is to sell short its vital contribution to making known the invisible world of logistics. In bringing the movement of stuff - things, material, matter - to the fore, Cargomobilities makes visible and knowable the largely hidden world of logistics (p. xiii) and crucially the politics that underscores the movements that shape and are shaped by, our daily lives.-- Kimberley Peters, University of Liverpool, The Mariner's Mirror