Symposium proposal: logistics and social reproduction

This symposium explores the generative potential of bringing together scholarship on logistics and social reproduction. Extending understandings of contemporary un/paid working lives forged in articulations between logistics-driven production and distribution systems and contingent formations of social reproduction, the symposium sets out a new agenda for transformative and radical scholarship on the contested geographies of logistical space. Drawing on materialist feminist traditions within radical geography, the symposium centres on the socially reproductive activities which enable and contest logistics as a hegemonic rationale for spatial organisation. Social reproduction is here the conceptual and political lens to not only understand the reproduction of logistical regimes, but also to reveal their contradictions and frictions, and generate emancipatory alternatives to dismantle their imaginaries and material conditions. With economic sectors that span fishing, farming, agribusiness, manufacturing, warehousing and road haulage, across the geographical contexts of India, Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, Italy, Czech Republic and the UK, the symposium will stimulate new thinking on value extraction, capitalist crises, resistance, and work within and beyond the wage.