Workshop: ‘Seeing Globalization – Alternative Perspectives on Production Today’

This workshop takes as its starting point that our notions of production are changing. Old assumptions about what makes globalization work are being challenged on many fronts. Some of those areas, such as infrastructures, have already become established fields of enquiry to examine both the material aspect that sustain and support modern life, as well as their political aspect in that they support the operations of capital and make visible new forms of resistances such as ‘riot logistics’. There are other areas that are nascent, such as the field of social sustainability, emerging out of sustainable development discussions, which probes how seismic shocks to supply chains have exacerbated workers’ vulnerability to forced labour. Here we are alerted to the fact that policymakers and business have very little understanding of social sustainability risks despite their support for regulatory frameworks that combat forced labour in supply chains.

In this workshop we are interested in discussing further some of these challenges to old assumptions about global production. We will examine the advantages of these new perspectives as well as limitations these present due to the disciplinary and methodological limitations of our inquiries. We will consider whether we need more imaginative approaches to global production that take us far beyond our scholarly comfort zones, as what lies ahead is still in formation and the imaginative aspects of the economy are being reworked.

Prof Victoria Hattam and Prof Rutvica Andrijasevic will get us started on this topic by presenting their most recent work on global production. Hattam will talk about questions of visibility and global production at Boeing. How, she wants to know, do companies navigate production at scale when many key relations remain out of sight – located if you will within folds. Andrijasevic will talk about her research on the gendered time politics of transnational production. Drawing on her research on electronics assembly, she will argue that a temporal approach to global production is pivotal in order to make visible diverse ways in which capital deploys time to reorganize and expand as well as it segments labour along gender and ethnic lines in order to ‘assemble’ a workforce best suited for the temporalities of global production.

Please let us know if you would like to attend the workshop. Tea and coffee will be provided.

The event is co-hosted by MMB with the faculty research groups Global Political Economy and Perspectives on Work.

Speakers:

Victoria Hattam is Leverhulme Visiting Professor with MMB at the University of Bristol and Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research. She received her PhD in Political Science from MIT. Hattam works at the intersection of political economy, bordering, and visuality. She is a member of the Multiple Mobilities Research Cluster in New York. In 2018-19, Hattam co-directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar on Imagined Mobilities with Miriam Ticktin, Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, and Alex Aleinikoff. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Rutvica Andrijasevic is a Professor of Work and Employment at University of Bristol Business School. Her most recent work examines the interdependences between software, hardware and labour in electronics manufacturing. Previously, she studied how states immigration policies foster vulnerability and exploitation of migrant women in human trafficking. She has published on these topics extensively and her writings have been translated into several languages: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Croatian and Mandarin. What drives her research is the desire to improve marginalised groups access to rights and justice. She serves on the Board of Trustees of Electronics Watch and works towards achieving responsible public procurement and rights of workers in electronics supply chains.