A Shipping Manifest

Graphic Design / Social Awareness / Critical University Studies/ Logistics / Printed Installation
A Collaborative Research Project with Dr Tierney Powell

Logistics is the dominant operating system of modern life. With its fixation on accelerating workflows, economic resilience, ceaseless optimization, efficiency, tracking, and calculation, logistics dictates how we work and live. Logistics is a way of thinking. It organizes, manages, and disciplines.

Higher education is not exempt. A Shipping Manifest explores the impact of corporatized higher education, from the individual to the systemic—from the personal experiences of academic work to the neoliberal logics that manage it.

Decreased public funding is part of a suite of neoliberal tactics shifting the role of higher education from a public good to yet another good to be sold to the public. Academic work is subject to intensifying calculation, transforming teaching, research, and service into metrics for evaluation. These conditions reshape the relationship between academic workers, as they also impact the relationship between academic work, students, and broader communities. A Shipping Manifest uses logistics as an analytic, interrogating the embodied experience of academic labor in the neoliberal university.

A shipping manifest is a record of cargo in transit. It requires quantification, enumeration, and calculation, the conversion of labor and materials into products into inventories, timelines, routes. It is actuarial, managerial. It tracks; it accounts.

To manifest describes the imaginative possibility of enactment, visualizing and in so doing making possible potentialities—future projections.

Our project conjures the twin meanings of “manifest,” ultimately asking the viewer to consider: how might we imagine and in so doing construct academic labor otherwise?

Wenxin Zhao & Dr. Tierney Powell
Mind Map & Q&A for Each Other

Wenxin Zhao’s broader work bridges the gap between emotional and embodied human experience and the data that shapes it, vehiculating statistical information towards human connection. Tierney Powell theorizes how literature, art, and culture puncture through the banal violence of global systems and imagine alternative ways of organizing life. A Shipping Manifest was created at the intersection of these approaches.

75*34 inches

The ubiquity of logistics as calculative logic and set of imperatives does not negate the vastly uneven experiences of work; precarity, managerial oversight, and working conditions vary greatly within higher education, not to mention within the broader global economy. A Shipping Manifest aims to shed light on the academic worker as precisely that: a worker.