Container Ships

(Dis-)Assembling the Life Cycle of Container Ships. Global Ethnographic explorations into Maritime Working Lives.

Image may contain: Vehicle, Water transportation, Boat, Ship, Container ship.

Containership Truman and Kennedy at San Francisco. By NOAA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

About the project

The container ship is the most significant icon of economic globalization. An ever-growing amount of commodities in circulation on this planet end up in stores after having been transported on container ships first. The ubiquity of the image of the container ship as a stand-in for globalization, typically used as a stock photo to signal “global business” in many media contexts, stands in contradiction to a rather peculiar issue: the object so often depicted upon closer inspection turns out to be vastly understudied, especially amongst social scientists. This is particularly true when it comes to the worlds of maritime work around container ships that are usually operating far away from the spotlight of concerned end-consumers of the goods being transported on them.

Shipbuilding, shipping, and ship-breaking are three key maritime industries that make up the most central nodes enabling the life cycle of a container ship. The objective of the project is to shed new light on the globe-spanning networks around these vessels, and on the workers that are involved in making, maintaining, and breaking the ships. By uniting three ethnographic sub-projects - one focusing on shipbuilding in South Korea and the Philippines, one on global shipping process, and one on ship-breaking in South Asia – the focus is also on the connections and disjunctures between the different components that make, maintain, and break container ships. The combination of ethnography with a large-scale "interpretive" comparison-making perspective will allow for the exploration of some of the key social, political and economic relations that feed into global economic processes today.

Financing 

The project is funded with NOK 7 992 000 under the FRIPRO-"Young Research Talent"-Scheme of the Norwegian Research Council, and will run between 2018-2023.

By NOAA's National Ocean Service (Flickr: Container Ship) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By NOAA's National Ocean Service (Flickr: Container Ship) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Publications

  • Schober, Elisabeth; Dewan, Camelia & Markkula, Johanna (2022). Life-Cycle of Container Ships: Chains of Value and Labour in Maritime Logistics. Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Anthropology. doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.374.
  • Dewan, Camelia; Schober, Elisabeth & Markkula, Johanna (2022). Container Ships: Life Cycles, Chains of Value, and Labor in Maritime Logistics. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO). ISSN 2040-1876. doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.374.
  • Schober, Elisabeth (2022). Working the supply chain: towards an anthropology of maritime logistics. In Kasmir, Sharryn & Gill, Lesley (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Anthropology of Labor. Routledge. ISSN 9781003158448.
  • Markkula, Johanna (2021). ‘We move the world’: the mobile labor of Filipino seafarers. Mobilities. ISSN 1745-0101. 16(2), p. 164–177. doi: 10.1080/17450101.2021.1880129.
  • Schober, Elisabeth & Leivestad, Hege (2021). Politics of scale: Colossal containerships and the crisis in global shipping. Anthropology Today. ISSN 0268-540X. 37(3), p. 3–7. doi: 10.1111/1467-8322.12650.
  • Dewan, Camelia (2021). Durniti or Durbolata: Self-Policing, Social Relations and Regulative Weakness in the Everyday Lives of Bangladeshi Government Officials. In Ruud, Arild Engelsen & Hasan, Mubashar (Ed.), Masks of authoritarianism: hegemony, power and public life in Bangladesh. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 9789811643132. p. 155–172. doi: 10.1007/978-981-16-4314-9_10.
  • Dewan, Camelia (2021). Embanking the Sundarbans: The Obfuscating Discourse of Climate Change. In Sillitoe, Paul (Eds.), THE ANTHROPOSCENE OF WEATHER AND CLIMATE: Ethnographic Contributions to the Climate Change Debate. Berghahn Books. ISSN 978-1-80073-231-5. p. 294–321.
  • Markkula, Johanna (2021). Containing Mobilities: Shifting Time and Space of Maritime Labor. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. ISSN 0920-1297. 89 . doi: 10.3167/fcl.2021.890103. Full text in Research Archive
  • Schober, Elisabeth (2021). Building ships while breaking apart. Container Economies and the Limits of Chaebol Capitalism. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. ISSN 0920-1297. 89. doi: 10.3167/fcl.2021.890102. Full text in Research Archive
  • Markkula, Johanna & Leivestad, Hege (2021). Introduction: Inside Container Economies. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. ISSN 0920-1297. 89. doi: 10.3167/fcl.2021.890101. Full text in Research Archive
  • Dewan, Camelia (2020). Climate Change as a Spice: Brokering Environmental Knowledge in Bangladesh's Development Industry. Ethnos. ISSN 0014-1844. doi: 10.1080/00141844.2020.1788109. Full text in Research Archive
  • Schober, Elisabeth (2019). Riding unstable currents: South Korean capital's migration to the Philippines. Rivista degli Studi Orientali. ISSN 1724-1863. 93(1-2), p. 263–277. doi: 10.19272/201903804016.

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  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). Toxic Justice? Roundtable on Epistemic Tension and the Neglected Otherwise in Fenceline Communities. Reflections on Shipbreaking in Bangladesh. .
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). Climate Refugees or Labour Migrants? Climate Reductive Translations of Women's Migration from Coastal Bangladesh .
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). Miljøvennlig skipsgjenvinning i Bangladesh, er det mulig?
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change and Water Futures in coastal Bangladesh.
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). 'Climate Refugees or Labour Migrants: Climate Reductive Translations of Women's Migration from Coastal Bangladesh', Panel: Conceptualizing Climate Displacement in an Agrarian World already on the Move, Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG).
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). 'Toxic Traces in Fluid Commons: Shipbreaking and More-than-Economic Dispossession in Coastal Bangladesh'. Fluid Commons workshop, Jun 9-10.
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). 'Toxic Traces in Fluid Commons: Shipbreaking and More-than-Economic Dispossession in Coastal Bangladesh' on the panel 'Future Commons'at EASA 2022, Belfast.
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). Polluted transformations: the fluidity of waters as a commons.
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). 'Human Interventions'. Stockholm Roundtable on Environment: Ecography. Stockholm University and Vitterhetsakademien. May 5-6.
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). Guest Lecturer on Coastal Justice: Ecologies, Societies & Infrastructures in South Asia, MA-course in South Asian Studies, Princeton University, Mar 15.
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). Guest lecturer on Development in a Changing Climate, MA-course in International Development Studies, McGill University, Oct 26, 2022.
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). Keynote lecture for 'Bangladesh Studies: An Overview".
  • Dewan, Camelia (2022). Researching South Asia: Climate Change - A roundtable.
  • Markkula, Johanna (2022). Thinking through the Ship Key Note Lecture.
  • Markkula, Johanna (2022). Into the Box Ship: social worlds and material entanglements Key Note Lecture.
  • Schober, Elisabeth (2022). Discussant at "Logistical Transformations" panel, EASA.
  • Schober, Elisabeth (2022). Malmö's Tears, Ulsan's Hope. Affective infrastructures and their resonances in global shipbuilding.
  • Leivestad, Hege; Markkula, Johanna & Schober, Elisabeth (2021). Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences. Focaalblog.
  • Dewan, Camelia & Nustad, Knut Gunnar (2020). Contested Waters and Fluid Properties in Capitalist Natures.
  • Dewan, Camelia & Sibilia, Elizabeth (2020). Zoom Workshop ´Toxic flows: Scales, spaces and lived experiences of toxicity on bodies and the environment.’.
  • Dewan, Camelia (2019). Precarious Livelihoods: Labour and Environment on the Shipbreaking Beaches of Chittagong, Bangladesh.
  • Dewan, Camelia (2019). Precarious Livelihoods: Labour & Environment in the Shipbreaking Beaches of Chittagong.

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Published Mar. 13, 2018 1:12 PM - Last modified Feb. 27, 2024 1:00 PM