Nicholas Welna

Since the 1960s, a logistics revolution has radically reconfigured racialized and gendered class formations worldwide. Coordinating supply chains is now more profitable than manufacturing most commodities. My project explores the work that “coordination” does in the logistics industry. Proposing an expansive analysis of logistics labor, I ask: What is coordination supposed to accomplish? How is it produced and enacted? What makes certain forms of coordination valuable, and for whom? To answer these questions, I will follow coordination wherever it leads. My starting point is express shipping, the logistics service used for the most complex coordination challenges. Studying this sector will clarify what coordination does for diverse capitalist projects. I propose a multi-sited ethnographic project modeled on the “hub-and-spokes” networks of express shipping companies. Beginning in Memphis, Tennessee, home of the FedEx hub and headquarters, I will investigate coordination as a set of practices embedded in landscapes and livelihoods. Memphis is this project’s “hub,” but following coordination as an ethnographic object also requires research in other cities where firms collaborate and compete with FedEx. Ultimately, this study of logistical coordination will advance anthropological theorizing around new forms of commodification, capital accumulation, and the processes that shape racialized and gendered class formations.