Provincialising the Italian Effect

What happens when radical Italian thought is uprooted from its initial context of formation and put to work in other contexts? Must this involve an objectification of the subjective processes of thought, their reification into theory? Or is the network of brains and bodies by now so globally extensive that the necessary translations can be accomplished notwithstanding the local specificity of experiences and cultures

Anti-Ageing Cultures, Biopolitics and Globalisation

In March 2004, the author attended the Inaugural International Conference on Longevity at the Sydney Exhibition and Convention Centre in Darling Harbour. As a cultural researcher interested in the interactions between demographic shifts, capitalist globalisation and changing forms of political power, the prospect of a direct encounter with the debates and practices surrounding the burgeoning field of anti-ageing medicine promised a means to observe the complex cultural dynamics of population ageing at play. This article explores the discord the atuhor witnessed; a quarrel that, despite the march of technological advance, attests the ongoing conflict in the nexus where politics meets life

Working the digital silk road : Alibaba's digital free trade zone in Malaysia

A warehouse is a lot like a computer, according to Zhu Lijun, leader of the algorithm team at Cainiao network, the logistics arm of China’s e-commerce giant the Alibaba Group. The “common reliance on storage, extraction, and processing lends the two some striking operational and structural parallels,” the engineer told an audience at the 2018 Global Smart Logistics Summit in Hangzhou (Alibaba Tech 2018). What are we to make of this comparison, given the increased presence of automated technologies in warehouses and the debate concerning their implications for workers (Delfanti and Frey 2020; Beverungen 2021)? To understand the warehouse as a computer with the spatial qualities of an industrial facility is to bring the question of digital work into settings that are at once technical and physical, software-driven, and primed for hard labor

The Academy as a logistical institution

In this article, I reflect on what my research practice in studying logistics has taught me about my research governance roles. There can be no doubt that logistical techniques and technologies, from enterprise resource planning systems to ranking tables, have affected conditions of labour and life in the contemporary academy. Tracing such patterns of influence, however, should not blind us to the ways in which the university has become a site in which flexible work practices and the infrastructures that enable them have been developed and exported to other kinds of institutions and organisations. That many technological companies have come to brand their facilities as campuses and introduced ‘no collar’ regimes of workplace attendance and performance is only one register of this flow

Operations of Platforms. A Global Process in a Multipolar World

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has engendered a crisis of mobility whose multiple dimensions have affected the movement of people and “stuff,” border regimes and logistical supply chains, the daily life of people in many parts of the world and the organization of labor. In such a conjuncture, digital platforms have emerged as key devices to manage the crisis, in such diverse fields as communication, food delivery, and e-commerce. this chapter we analyze the operations of digital platforms, or maybe more precisely processes of platformization of capital and labor. Such processes are definitely global, they reshape economy, governance, and society across diverse geographical scales, while their impact is characterized by different degrees of heterogeneity. We start by fleshing out what we call the platform model, and by analyzing some of its implications for capital and labor. Then, following the call to “de-Westernize platform studies”, we discuss the challenges it raises, and we conclude with an analysis of the processe of platformization in China

From flows of culture to the circuits of logistics : borders, regions, labour in transit

In Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders. No. 2 (Dec. 2010). When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural

Automating labour and the spatial politics of data centre technologies

Data politics traffics through data centres. A primary function of data centres over the next decades will consist of supporting the transition to automated economies with the integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics into processes of capital valorisation and accumulation. Stemming from a project that investigates data centres in Asia, this contribution positions the age of automation in terms of the spatial politics of data infrastructures. Singapore is renowned as a growth centre for data storage facilities in Asia. Yet the policy literature on smart nations lacks narratives that address the political and social problem of job loss precipitated by automated futures. Because data centres are themselves automated environments and provide infrastructure that enables automation in workplaces spread across geographical scales, they offer a strategic object for research on the varied implications of automation for labour. The extent to which data centres make worlds and reconfigure regions bears upon conceptualisations of sovereign power harnessed to the state. This contribution maintains that an emergent sovereign form registers in the operational logic of computational machines special to data centres

Assessment of microbranding as an alternative marking technique for long-term identification of New Zealand lizards

‘Microbranding’, a system for individually identifying reptiles and amphibians based on a numbered code of spot brands applied to the body and limbs, was tested on New Zealand skinks and geckos. Common geckos (Woodworthia maculata) and copper skinks (Oligosoma aeneum) were used as test animals. Brands applied in autumn took 3 months or more to heal. There was no evidence of brand-related mortality or increased parasite loads in branded animals. However, after healing the brands faded very rapidly in the skinks to become totally unreadable in all surviving branded skinks after 2.5 years and not accurately readable in most geckos after 3 years. We therefore consider the technique unsuitable as a standard marking procedure for New Zealand lizards

Beaver Dam Influences on Streamflow Hydraulic Properties and Thermal Regimes

Beaver dams alter channel hydraulics which in turn change the geomorphic templates of streams. Variability in geomorphic units, the building blocks of stream systems, and water temperature, critical to stream ecological function, define habitat heterogeneity and availability. While prior research has shown the impact of beaver dams on stream hydraulics, geomorphic template, or temperature, the connections or feedbacks between these habitat measures are not well understood. This has left questions regarding relationships between temperature variability at different spatial scales to hydraulic properties such as flow depth and velocity that are dependent on the geomorphology. We combine detailed predicted hydraulic properties, field-based maps with an additional classification scheme of geomorphic units, and detailed water temperature observations throughout a study reach to demonstrate the relationship between these factors at different spatial scales (reach, beaver dam complexes, and geomorphic units). Over a three-week, low flow period we found temperature to vary 2 °C between the upstream and downstream extents of the reach with a net warming of 1 °C during the day and a net cooling of 0.5 °C at night. At the beaver dam complex scale, net warming of 1.15 °C occurred during the day with variable cooling at night. Regardless of limited temperature changes at these larger scales, the temperature variability within a beaver dam complex reached up to 10.5 °C due to the diversity of geomorphic units. At the geomorphic unit scale, the highly altered flow velocity and depth distributions within primary geomorphic units provide an explanation of the temperature variability within the dam complex and insight regarding increases in habitat heterogeneity

Postface

Nous sommes très heureux de constater que la notion de « multiplication des formes du travail » (multiplication of labour), développée à l’origine dans notre livre Border as Method (La frontière comme méthode, 2013), stimule la recherche sur le travail en Chine. Cette notion est née d’une approche critique des théories sur la division internationale du travail et d’une tentative connexe d’élaborer une critique de l’économie politique des frontières dans la conjoncture mondiale actuelle. La Ch..