Center for Ideas & Society Resident Fellows

“Data Migration” traces the emergence of a global environmental and climatological outlook through the often-forgotten work of both data gatherers in colonial Africa and data compilers in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. The project attempts to uncover the scientific contributions of both African and European lay observers, who recorded and relayed climatological data from African colonies to the metropole. In Europe, clearing houses like the Deutsche Seewarte (the German Marine Observatory) in Hamburg assembled, sorted, and prepared the incoming data for publication. “Data Migration” will pay particular attention to the methods and ways in which individuals and institutions transformed the often place-specific and sometimes even qualitative information from the colonies into streamlined and quantitative data, portrayed in neat tables and smooth world maps. This process of standardization, the project argues, tended to obscure the local specificities of climatological conditions and their circumstances of recording, but also contributed to a nascent vision of an interconnected planet, characterized by a singular world or global climate.

The history of logistics is said to begin in the 1960s with the shipping container. But contemporary logistics, which moves goods, people, and information from point to point efficiently to maximize profit, has a history as old as capitalism itself. And, because corporate growth is the horizon of its every operation, the logistical mindset imbues quotidian life with a transactional, competitive, and security-minded disposition that erodes alternative ways of being in the world. This book project, Logistical Life, blends literary, cultural studies, Black studies and visual studies with the history of science, technology, and economics, to tell a new story about the long rise of logistics, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Even before the pandemic, logistics and its iconic form, the supply chain, had changed everyday life, as at-home delivery, cheap travel, on-demand digital services, and instant global communication became ordinary expectations. The term itself saturated our consciousnesses: “It’s logistics,” we’d say, when organizing domestic projects, family gatherings, and other mundane business. The corporate bywords of logistics, “agility,” “leanness,” “resilience,” and “flow,” became ideals of personal development and individual economic security in uncertain times. The pandemic has heightened the critical stakes of logistics, as current delays in vaccine rollouts and racial and class inequity in “essential” logistical work reshape our cultural discourses in ways unstudied by management, economics, and sociology scholars. Logistical Life offers a comprehensive critical reading of logistics’ tightened grip on everyday life in globalized culture.