Department seminar: Hege Høyer Leivestad

Seminar paper

The standardized shipping container has featured as one of the protagonists of the transformations in global trade. While central to the world economy, the shipping container is also a seductive symbol of mobility, representing the illusion of friction-free flow of goods.

This presentation takes the shipping container and its anonymized cargo as a starting point and looks at how container economies are constituted on the ground in a European port. The paper draws upon fieldwork among workers, managers and bureaucrats in the Port of Algeciras Bay, a so-called transshipment hub located at the Strait of Gibraltar at the gateway between Europe and Africa.

In Algeciras, containerized maritime logistics has since the 1990s created a thriving cargo mobility, in an area otherwise characterized by high unemployment rates and shadow economies. Focusing on logistics labour in the port, I demonstrate how the shipping container operates as a local currency.  While the shipping industry foregrounds container mobility as measure of success and high production, these boxes of cargo furthermore sustain local labour hierarchies and are central pieces in power negotiations.

About the lecturer

Hege Høyer Leivestad recently joined the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo as Associate Professor. She comes from a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Stockholm. Hege’s research has been concerned with the relationship between mobility and materiality, and she has published on homemaking/housing, social class, logistics labour and shipping. Leivestad is the author of the monograph Caravans: Lives on Wheels in Contemporary Europe (2018), while her current book project The Port: Life and Labour at the Strait of Gibraltar is based on long-term fieldwork in a Spanish cargo port.