Containing the Ship of State: Managing Mobility in an Age of Logistics

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. 2018. Major: Political Science. Advisor: Raymond Duvall. 1 computer file (PDF); 400 pages.This dissertation argues that global logistical circulation, although often taken for granted as a banal economic process, is a political project central to the making of world order. To make this argument, it examines the social and political economic impacts of the concomitant rise of logistical management and shipping containerization as twin operations intensifying the global circulation of commercial capital. Since the 1960s, businesses have increasingly experimented with just-in-time logistical techniques to speed the realization of surplus value, leading to the rise of global transoceanic networks of distribution that reorganize commercial circulation across distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies. As logistical management systems have sought to regularize, standardize, and create flexible networks for circulating goods across vast distances around the world, they have become crucial to the expanded reproduction of capital. Accordingly, states have also adopted logistics-oriented growth strategies, investing in organizing and securing a socio-spatial order that produces a world safe for the movement of commercial capital, often in ways that inhibit the social and spatial mobility of vulnerable populations that live and work along global supply chains. The empirical focus of the dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the Trans-Pacific shipping passage between the US and China. Understanding logistics as both a material practice and calculative rationality, this dissertation employs an ethnographic approach to interrogate the effects of logistics’ global rise through four cuts: 1) A theoretical and historical analysis of the rise of logistics management and shipping containerization in the 1960s, 2) the securitization of goods movement in US maritime cargo policy, 3) the expansion of logistical infrastructure across the world’s oceans and in Los Angeles and Singapore, and 4) the seafaring labor process. My overarching claim is that logistical practices and rationalities exacerbate growing and often contradictory tensions between the mobility of capital and the containment of people and infrastructure that facilitate global circulation. Rather than understand containment as a static process of sequestration or enclosure that impedes the ability for capital and people to circulate, processes of containment have gained fundamentally productive functions that intensify and facilitate, rather than prevent or deter the long-distance expansion of capitalist networks. In this way, logistics produces a set of relations in which moving the world’s goods across space comes to be understood as normative and desirable, while containing the human lives that do this work is seen as necessary and productive

Introduction: Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics

Since the mid-20th century, logistics has evolved into a wide-ranging science of circulation involved in planning and managing flows of innumerable kinds. In this introductory essay, we take stock of the ascendancy and proliferation of logistics, proposing a critical engagement with the field. We argue that logistics is not limited to the management of supply chains, military or corporate. Rather, it is better understood as a calculative logic and spatial practice of circulation that is at the fore of the reorganization of capitalism and war. Viewed from this perspective, the rise of logistics has transformed not only the physical movement of materials but also the very rationality by which space is organized. It has remade economic and military space according to a universalizing logic of abstract flow, exacerbating existing patterns of uneven geographical development. Drawing on the articles that make up this themed issue, we propose that a critical approach to logistics is characterized by three core commitments: (1) a rejection of the field’s self-depiction as an apolitical science of management, along with a commitment to highlighting the relations of power and acts of violence that underpin it; (2) an interest in exposing the flaws, irrationalities, and vulnerabilities of logistical regimes; and (3) an orientation toward contestation and struggle within logistical networks

A retrospective database study on 2-year weight trajectories in first-episode psychosis

IntroductionIt is critical to focus on individual weight profiles in line with efforts to tailor treatment, given the heterogeneous nature of the clinical population. This study aims to identify and describe possible two-year weight trajectories among patients accepted to the Early Psychosis Intervention Programme (EPIP) in Singapore.MethodsDe-identified data was extracted from EPIP’s standing database for patients accepted from 2014 to 2018 with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder. Data collected at fixed time-points (baseline, 1-year, and 2-year) included anthropometric measures (height and weight), and sociodemographic (age, sex, highest education level, and vocational status) and clinical (duration of untreated psychosis, number of inpatient admissions, and scores on the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and Global Assessment of Functioning) information.ResultsA total of 391 complete data sets were included for main analyses. Those with missing weight data were more likely to be males, older at baseline, have a highest education level of tertiary and above at baseline, and have a longer duration of untreated psychosis. The weight change across two years resulted in the following membership breakdown: 151 (38.6%) in super high risk; 133 (34.0%) in high risk mitigated; 17 (4.3%) in at risk; 34 (8.8%) in delayed risk; and 56 (14.4%) in low risk.DiscussionThe lack of pharmacological, dietary, and physical activity data is a significant limitation in this study; however, the results reinforce the justification for future studies to prospectively capture and examine the influence of these data, with the aim of early detection and weight intervention for high risk groups

Trends in Subjective Quality of Life Among Patients With First Episode Psychosis—A 1 Year Longitudinal Study

Quality of life (QoL) is often used as an outcome assessment in programs treating patients with first-episode psychosis (FEP). The aim of this study was to examine the longitudinal trend of subjective QoL among patients with FEP and identify the potential influence of patients' social-demographic/lifestyle factors on the trend of QoL. Two hundred and eighty subjects participated in the study. Patient's demographics and subjective QoL were collected at baseline, 6 months and 1 year follow-up. Data were analyzed with a fixed-effect general linear regression model. Subjective QoL demonstrated significant trends of improvement in all four subdomains (physical health, psychological health, social relationships, and environment). Compared with unemployed participants, employed participants were significantly associated with better social relationships (p = 0.005) and environment (p = 0.029) after adjusting for age and gender. Moderation analysis demonstrated a significant improvement of physical health, social relationships, and environment for participants with a higher level of educational achievement, but not for participants with a lower level of educational achievement. Our results indicate that patients with FEP experienced significant improvement in subjective QoL over a 1 year period. Being employed was associated with overall better social relationships and environment among patients with FEP and higher educational achievement was associated with improvement of physical health, social relationship, and environment. Hence, educational achievement and employment could be considered for future optimization of early psychosis intervention programs

Disruption from above, the middle and below: Three terrains of governance

AbstractThe term disruption has become a buzzword for our times, although there is little clarity over what the term means, how it is deployed, and towards what ends. In order to understand the analytical and political stakes that are embedded in the deployment of ‘disruption’ as a rationale for various sources of upheaval, in this article I argue that these three terrains of disruption should be understood as theories of governance, and term them ‘disruption from above’, ‘disruption from the middle’, and ‘disruption from below’. Each terrain of disruption embodies different ethoses, actors, and goals: the first connoting elite-driven creative destruction and innovation; the second obfuscating the capitalist imperative that produces world-systemic upheavals; and the third seeking to expose the structures of violence and inequality built into such practices. I illustrate these three terrains through a structural account that traces the popularity of the disruption discourse from its origins to its material application; analyse an illustrative example of the assetisation of infrastructure and how it bureaucratises governance and shifts relations of power; and conclude by examining infrastructural forms of protest against such forms. I argue that the confusion over what disruption means, who exercises it, and upon whom is not a coincidence: rather, disruption's polysemy is structurally produced as a way to disguise ongoing capitalist crisis as a technical problem that market innovations can solve

Exploring economic inequality and social well-being in Singapore

Global Independent Study, Summer 2019 -- Singapore, Singapore -- Partner Agencie(s): N/Ahttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/152316/1/Chua_Poster.pd

Logistical Violence, Logistical Vulnerabilities : Review of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade

In this ground-breaking work, Deborah Cowen makes the first book-length critical intervention into the field of business logistics. Tracing the social, spatial and political transformations wrought by the ‘logistics revolution’, Cowen argues that logistical systems have blurred the boundaries between production and circulation, civilian and military life, and geopolitics and geo-economics, constructing an architecture of the supply chain animated by both the art of war and the science of business. This review considers the political stakes of Cowen’s argument that logistics has reconfigured capitalist social relations of production, especially in relation to the securitisation of spatial mobility and the restructuring of the labour process. In particular, Cowen’s wager that logistical supply-chains are characterised by their vulnerability - and that attendant possibilities for building solidarity emerge out of movements that disrupt such flows - is interrogated in order to question whether such interruptions effectively produce challenges to value-in-motion, or actually become integral to processes of value production