(Dis-)Assembling the Life Cycle of Container Ships. Global Ethnographic explorations into Maritime Working Lives.

The container ship is the most significant icon of economic globalization. An ever-growing amount of commodities in circulation on this planet end up in stores after having been transported on container ships first. The ubiquity of the image of the container ship as a stand-in for globalization, typically used as a stock photo to signal 'global business' in many media contexts, stands in contradiction to a rather peculiar issue: the object so often depicted upon closer inspection turns out to be vastly understudied, especially amongst social scientists. This is particularly true when it comes to the worlds of maritime work around container ships that are usually operating far away from the spotlight of concerned end-consumers of the goods being transported on them. Shipbuilding, shipping, and ship-breaking are three key maritime industries that make up the most central nodes enabling the life cycle of a container ship. The objective of the project is to shed new light on the globe-spanning networks around these vessels, and on the workers that are involved in making, maintaining, and breaking the ships. By uniting three ethnographic sub-projects - one focusing on shipbuilding in South Korea and the Philippines (birth), one on global shipping process (life), and one on ship-breaking in Bangladesh (death / afterlife) the focus is also on the connections and disjunctures between the different components that make, maintain, and break container ships. In addition, shorter visits of various maritime industrial hubs in Europe help us connect the dots between the sub-projects. The combination of ethnography with a large-scale "interpretive" comparison-making perspective allows for the exploration of some of the key social, political, environmental and economic relations that feed into global economic processes today. Our findings highlight the relationship between the changing materialities of the ships themselves (in terms of size, etc) and the working lives around them. Where and how are ships built, operated and broken up? How are ports transformed as a result? And how do these processes contribute to global stoppages (such as the Evergiven in Suez), overcapacity, and shifting everyday practices of work at shipyards, shipbreaking yards, ports and onboard the ships themselves?

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Shipbuilding, shipping, and ship-breaking are three rather unfamiliar maritime industries that make up the most crucial nodes enabling the life cycle of a container ship. While anthropologists have done important work studying individual segments of this chain that has played a pivotal role in facilitating globalization, the connections and disjunctures between the different components that make, maintain, and break container ships have not been systematically studied as of yet. A holistic approach taken towards container ships will show up important social, political and economic relations that enlighten how global capitalism uses labour today. Container ships are a rather exceptional object in the sense that they are things that also transport other things: they are both a commodity in themselves, which can be studied as one global value chain among many, and they are the actual vessels that, through their capacity to transport goods, enable the emergence of numerous other commodity chains. In the effort to investigate the connecting points and moments of disjointment between these maritime industries, the project will engage with both the literature on global commodity chains and the social life of things, and build on a small, but dynamic body of writings that explicitly focus on the working worlds around container ships. By combining ethnography (i.e. the long-term observation of people?s everyday interactions in their environments) with a large-scale "interpretive" comparison-making perspective, the three core members of the team will provide a novel terrain for future social scientific research. In bringing all three worlds of work together that make up a the life cycle of a container ship, the project will illuminate some of the larger underlying fault-lines behind the ways in which global capitalism appropriates labour today.