Project Title: Emergent Logistics and Experimental Ethnography

“Emergent Logistics and Experimental Ethnography,” explores the problem of methodological engagement with the complex patterns of logistical movement that power the circulation of money and energy globally. Building upon our previous work, “Logistics in the Making of Mobile Worlds,” we aim to expand our Experimental Field School to the diverse geographies of commerce, speculation, finance, energy-production, and distribution. Our project interrogates these processes through sites such as Chicago’s e-commerce facilities, banking firms, and energy plants that power the transportation hubs and data centers of the city, to Delhi’s expansive networks of gasoline and diesel transportation, electric rickshaws, and emerging transition to sustainable energy systems and decarbonization. We plan to cultivate permanent networks of research at the University of Chicago and the UChicago Delhi Center by inviting scholars from around the world to join our Experimental Field Schools, where we will develop methodological approaches to pressing logistical questions through site visits, observation, and collaborative design. 

Biography:
Jennifer Cole is Professor and Chair of Comparative Human Development, and Co-Chair of the Committee on African Studies. Her work examines how personal change over the life course shapes, and is shaped by, broader political, economic and cultural transformations: the unruly terrain where person and history meet. Cole is the author of two monographs, Forget Colonialism: Sacrifice and the art of Memory in Madagascar (2001) and Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar (2010) as well as four edited volumes.  She is currently finishing a book entitled The Foreigner’s Wife:  Migration and the Work of Alignment that develops an approach to understanding the relationship between personal aspirations that lead to migration and broader social change. Cole is the recipient of many grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim, Fulbright, ALCS, American Philosophical Society, Radcliffe Institute, and Institute for Etudes Avancées, Paris as well as the divisional prize for excellence in graduate teaching.