Digitalized Ports, Racialized Labor: Shifting Infrastructures for Work in Container Shipping: DIGIPORTS

Programme(s): HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) 

Topic(s): ERC-2021-STG - ERC STARTING GRANTS

Call for proposal: ERC-2021-STG

Funding Scheme: HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-Based

Grant agreement ID: 101039641

Objective:

Container shipping has implications for everyone who has ever shopped in a store or online. Shipping is the backbone of the global economy. 90% of the world's goods travel by ship. The industry has a global reach and a highly diverse workforce. It is also structured by workers' nationalities, resulting in inequalities. Inequalities occur within ships, where some European workers systematically receive higher wages, and between regions, where labor conditions vary.

Shipping is currently undergoing rapid change as it digitalizes its workflows. It is unknown if digitalization will help or hinder worker equality, or for which groups. Technology can increase workers' skills and make travel safer and more efficient. Yet the benefits may only extend to some, while others face difficulties becoming skilled or lose their jobs altogether. Because pay and working conditions are structured by nationality, the digitalization of shipping will likely also affect labor's racialization, or how practices and ideas about race are constructed and employed, and related inequalities.

The aim of DIGIPORTS is to understand how and to what extent digitalization is reconfiguring the racialization of shipping labor. This project innovatively combines critical logistics and algorithm studies. It provides a groundbreaking study of how the on-the-ground implementation of digital infrastructures is reconfiguring four processes of racialization: the displacement, classification, potential for criminalization, and related precarity of work.

DIGIPORTS is the first ethnographic study of the digitalization of shipping. It will provide an integrated analysis of how digitalization is reshaping labor and racial inequalities, develop a four-part framework for studying racialization as sets of institutionalized practices that extend across space and time, and lay the groundwork for a new interdisciplinary field: digital logistics studies.