Category Archives: Events

Event: Logistics and Infrastructure in the Age of Trump, with Empire Logistics
Place: Room #2: East Bay Community Space (507 55th St), Main Space
Time: 5:30pm-6:30pm

A workshop addressing Bay Area logistical infrastructures: vulnerabilities, key sites of struggles, and important connections to broader dynamics and solidarity opportunities along the global supply chain. Special focus on understanding and responding to Trump’s proposed infrastructure projects.Empire Logistics maps the global supply chain through research that articulates the infrastructure and ‘externalized costs’—human, economic, social and environmental—of the international flow of things.

“Trump and Infrastructure”
An overview of Bay Area logistical infrastructures facilitated by Empire Logistics: vulnerabilities, key sites of struggles, and important connections to broader dynamics along the global supply chain. Special focus on countering Trump’s proposed infrastructure projects.

Sunday, January 8 from 10AM–12PM (Ballroom A)

No More Presidents: Street Tactics, Political Education, Anti-Repression—A weekend convergence of skillshares and discussions for the inauguration and beyond. Food, Distros & Tabling, Arts & Crafts, Banner Making, and Childcare Available

Saturday 1/7, 10am-5pm & Sunday 1/8, 10am-4pm

Omni Commons, 4799 Shattuck Ave., Oakland, California

10–3pm, Sunday September 25th

101 Broadway

Oakland, CA

This day-long open research session seeks to bring together local housing, labor, infrastructure, ecology and data/open access activists to make connections among struggles and brainstorm modes of solidarity through supply chain/infrastructure research. The morning will introduce the Empire Logistics project—a collaborative mapping initiative focused on supply chain infrastructure. In the afternoon, attendees will be invited to contribute ideas and data to the project maps—with a particular focus on the material connections between Bay Area logistics, e-commerce and gentrification. We will also focus on connections between supply chain struggles in the Bay Area and other parts of the world (current strikes in Chinese technology factories, pipeline protests in North Dakota, Hanjin bankruptcy, etc).

Bring a laptop if you can.

Coffee and snacks will be provided.

This event, the result of a partnership between Empire Logistics, FICTILIS, and the Jack London Improvement District, is free and open to the public and is made possible with support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Museum of Capitalism, and our host the Port Workspaces.

Presented as part of the panel “Art and Logistical Disruption” at the Arts of Logistics conference at Queen Mary University of London.

Sunday, June 6, 2016

This presentation argues that the ‘revolutions’ in cybernetics and logistics have become the dominant forces and paradigmatic discourses in contemporary global capitalism. With its cybernetic core located in the north and a major commodity gateway/culture industry core in the south, California drives capitalist innovation, circulation and exploitation. It has also become a flashpoint for anti-capitalist struggle. Empire Logistics has been mapping and researching the techno-circulatory landscape of California for the past five years. This presentation will trace the project’s successes, failures and challenges through a look at the various maps generated, videos produced, research undertaken and events facilitated.

more information

Presented at Angels Gate Cultural Center, in conjunction with the exhibition HOLD UP

Sunday, March 6
1 pm
Free

with Ken Ehrlich, and A.W. from the L.A. ONDA collective

Southern California is the main gateway for commodities moving into the United States. Nearly half of all goods entering the US pass through the network of ports, rail lines, highways, airports, and warehouses in LA County/Inland Empire. Empire Logistics, a supply chain research initiative, will discuss the importance of the Southern California supply chain to the global economy—and how these nodes, lines and flows might be confronted, disrupted and reimagined toward a post-capitalist future.

more information

Presented at the David Brower Center in partnership with Empire Logistics

Monday, November 30
7 pm
Free

How do products move through our spaces, and why does it matter? This evening program will explore the global supply chain and the Bay Area’s position as a key technology hub — or “supernode” — that powerfully shapes how goods are produced, circulated, and consumed throughout the world. Empire Logistics will showcase new mapping and diagramming tools, and offer a closer understanding of local and global supply chains for artists, activists, researchers and consumers themselves. Panelists will include Peter Olney, former Director of Organizing for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), Charmaine Chua, political ethnographer of container shipping across the trans-pacific passage, and Jasper Bernes, poet and essayist.

Jasper Bernes received his PhD from the Department of English at UC Berkeley in 2012. He is currently completing a book manuscript, Poetry in the Age of Deindustrialization, about the role poetry plays in the postindustrial restructuring of labor. Excerpts from this project have been published in or are forthcoming from MLQ and Critical Inquiry. He is also the author of two books of poetry, We Are Nothing and So Can You (2015), and Starsdown (2007). Other essays, articles, and reviews can be found in the Los Angles Review of Books, Endnotes, Radical Philosophy, Viewpoint, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere. He teaches in the English Department at Stanford University.

Charmaine Chua is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her current dissertation project is a political ethnography of container shipping across the trans-pacific passage, which examines the embodied politics of inhabiting, laboring in, and disrupting the logistics supply chain. She recently worked and lived on board a container ship for six weeks, crossing the Pacific Ocean from LA to Taipei.

Peter Olney is the retired Director of Organizing for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Olney has been part of the labor movement for over 40 years. He has worked for numerous labor unions as an organizer and negotiator. Since coming to California in 1983 he has focused his work on building organization in the immigrant working class. From 2001 until 2004 Olney was the Associate Director of the University of California’s Institute for Labor and Employment (ILE). Olney has a Masters in Business Administration from UCLA. He resides in San Francisco, California.