Cataloging Logistics. Migration, Digitisation, Forms of Life
16. Jun
Workshop
Venue: Kunstraum. Leuphana University Lüneburg.
The workshop “Cataloging Logistics” departs from the premise that logistics poses both a decisive terrain for contemporary transformations in social and everyday life and a critical theoretical lens for understanding the present. Certainly matters of timely concern, the workshop’s focus on migration, digitisation, and forms of life in relation to logistics moreover presents a multiple and open-ended approach to broadly understood questions of work, play, and survival, the mutual blurring and distinction as well as entanglements of which can be examined so as to develop an analysis that moves between the “everyday” and the “social”.
With these points in mind, the workshop is set up to facilitate a conversation between several existing research and teaching platforms situated between cultural studies and the social sciences: firstly, a working group on “logistics and migration” at the Berlin Institute for Migration and Integration Research created to prepare for the “Investigating Logistics” summer university that will take place as part of the KOSMOS initiative at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in September; secondly, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg’s Faculty for Cultural Studies; thirdly, the Digital Cultures Research Lab (DCRL) at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg; and fourthly, a one-year MA-level research seminar organized around the ethnographic study of logistics at Humboldt University Berlin’s Institute for European Ethnology.
The workshop’s trans- and inter-disciplinary composition and the fact that it convenes scholars engaged in ethnographic research at various points of intellectual formation furthermore provide an occasion to discuss project design and method. To this end, the workshop contains a special discussion block facilitated around a "methods brochure" created by the MA students in attendance from Humboldt and their research seminar classmates.