Please join the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities “Sites of Inquiry” research group and the Van Hunnick History Department for a guest lecture and discussion about the pervasive structures of logistical power. Professor Susan Zieger (UC Riverside) will give a talk related to her new book, Logistics and Power: Supply Chains from Slavery to Space (University of California Press, 2025). Light refreshments will be provided. Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, and the Levan Institute for the Humanities.

To RSVP, please submit the following form by Thursday, October 30.

About the Book: From supply chains to surveillance, how logistics drives modern power—and its consequences.
 
Movement is the lifeblood of capital, even more so than growth. If goods, people, and information don't flow, then profits don't either. Ensuring that laborers, shipping containers, media, commercially valuable data, and much else are in the right place at the right time demands a subtle choreography. Enter logistics.
 
Susan Zieger argues that logistics is the foundation of power in our time. Blending detailed historical research with real-life stories that crystallize the human and ecological consequences of supply chains, Logistics and Power shows how the pursuit of efficient movement has come to organize economies while disordering societies and selves. Logistics emerges as the key to consumerism and the experience of work. It justifies corporate and police surveillance, illuminates patterns of migration and exploitation, and explains why the oceans are clotted with plastic. It is in the sphere of logistics that capitalist motives are most dramatically in tension with planetary needs.
 
A headfirst encounter with the obscure forces subordinating all goals below those of capital, Logistics and Power points the way to an alternative: a mindful and politically attentive kind of movement compatible with human thriving.

About the Author: Susan Zieger is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Riverside. She us author of three books, including Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Logistics and Power: Supply Chains from Slavery to Space (University of California Press, 2025). She also co-edited two volumes: Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (Duke University Press, 2021), with Nicole Starosielski and Matt Hockenberry, and The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (Northwestern University Press, 2022), with Kelly Rich and Nicole Rizzuto. In 2024, Zieger was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Resident in the “Rethinking Capitalism” working group.

Please direct any questions to [email protected].