Supply Studies

On the Critical Study of Supply Chains, Logistics, and our Global Assemblies of Assembly.

"This focus on supply chains—or supply studies, as some have called it—is rooted in the knowledge that our relationship to technology cannot be understood purely in terms of how we make use of it. Instead, the approach is premised on investigating the metals, refineries, factories, shipping containers, and warehouses that not only manufacture and deliver our electronics, but also form the infrastructure that organizes our society. Supply studies attempts to distill and make legible these global networks, whose complexity obfuscates the harm they cause. It provides a crucial lens for understanding the real origins, and the real impacts, of our devices."
—Jackie Brown, "Source Material," Real Life (2021)
Supply Studies Splash
Manifest of Western Electric Telephone (1927).

Recent Posts

Logistical Histories of Computing
Matthew Hockenberry
Matthew Hockenberry

A special issue of the Annals of the History of Computing edited by Matthew Hockenberry and Miriam Posner.

Delivery Exception: Supply Chain Justice & Reconciliation
Matthew Hockenberry
Matthew Hockenberry

Delivery Exception brings together scholars and organizers to talk about supply chain justice.

Supply Studies Research Network
Matthew Hockenberry
Matthew Hockenberry

We are launching a research network for the critical study of logistics.

Advancing the Digital Humanities
Matthew Hockenberry
Matthew Hockenberry

I am pleased to share that Manifest has been awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We will be using the grant to further develop the research network around Manifest and build more comphrensive curriculum materials for the critical study of logistics in the humanities.

Logistics as Conspiracy
Matthew Hockenberry
Matthew Hockenberry

Photographs of vinyl sheets and cardboard inserts in awkward approximation of absent goods are mocked by some, but suggest to others signs of deliberate subterfuge. Even mundane maritime maps are assembled as evidence of – commenters claim – countries “under attack.”

Studies on the Supply Chain Snarl
Matthew Hockenberry
Matthew Hockenberry

An interactive sample of tweets that show some of the social media discourse around the supply chain crisis.

Manifest / Manifesto: Toward Supply Chain Reconciliation
Matthew Hockenberry
Matthew Hockenberry

Here the manifest becomes an accounting of injuries. I think this provides a better model for unraveling the global supply chain than transparency. Rather than allow transparency to remain as a form of corporate responsibility, with “mapping the supply chain” an exercise in corporate power, “making out its manifest” might now attempt to account for our value, and our injuries. It records the places where labor has been exploited, where the earth has been plundered, where waste overruns into rivers, and poison bleeds into the air. It is not a proclamation from on high, but an admonition from below. Not an attempt at supply chain resilience, but an opportunity for supply chain reconciliation.

Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media
Matthew Hockenberry
Matthew Hockenberry

Assembly Codes examines how logistics—the techniques of organizing and coordinating the movement of materials, bodies, and information—has substantially impacted the production, distribution, and consumption of media, while demonstrating that media technologies are central to its operation. In charting the specific points of contact, dependence, and friction between media and logistics, it argues that one cannot be understood apart from the other.

The Supply House: Catalogues and Commerce
Matthew Hockenberry
Matthew Hockenberry

Merging visual representation with textual listing, the mail-order catalogue brought the anticipation of availability to the work of supply. As it did, it crystalized the expectations of capitalism for contemporary consumer culture. This essay surveys some examples of this form around this moment of transformation: as the catalogue form gave way to the catalogue function, and the raw stuff of supply transformed into an operative relation—an ontological object defined not by material presence, but by the potential for supply.

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