Hege Høyer Leivestad (Stockholm University) gave on 12.11.2021 a paper entitled “The Port Revisited: Cargo capitalism at the Strait of Gibraltar”.
Abstract:
In line with a cost-efficient ‘just-in-time’ logic, commodities travel the world along maritime routes and port infrastructures. A growing body of literature in the social sciences has (re)turned to maritime space, engaging with the ‘dark side’ of globalisation and the unequal power relations coming as a result of the logistics revolution. In this paper I turn to a European container hub, showing how pasts, presents and futures of a port town are transformed by what I call ‘cargo capitalism’. The empirical focus of this talk lies on the Spanish Port of Algeciras Bay, a so-called transshipment hub at the Strait of Gibraltar – where only 14 kilometres separate Europe and Africa at the narrowest point. In Algeciras, maritime logistics has since the 1990s created a thriving cargo economy, in an area otherwise characterized by high unemployment rates and shadow economies. But the port’s dependence on multinational companies’ trade routes and infrastructural investments makes cargo a contested future in Europe’s southern borderlands. By engaging with how port workers, logistics managers, port bureaucrats and local residents in Algeciras relate to the presence of cargo, I show in this talk how logistics both channels and blocks imaginations of economic and social futures.
Bio:
Hege Høyer Leivestad is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Leivestad also works as a Researcher in the ERC funded project PORTS at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. She is the author of the monograph Caravans: Lives on Wheels in Contemporary Europe (Bloomsbury 2018). Her current book project The Port: Life and Labour at a Maritime Crossroads, is based on extensive fieldwork in a Spanish container port.