Upstream, Downstream, Offshore: Constancy amidst the flux of supply chains

Julie Y. Chu

May 28, 2026 (Thursday): 17:30-19:00 

Room 301, 3F, Building 10, Sophia University

In person only / No registration required

Before “the chain” became the dominant figure for understanding the dynamics of supply and demand in the 1980s, fluvial landscapes have long undergirded logistical projects for building out and maintaining the infrastructural channels of commerce and travel, especially around estuarial or delta zones where rivers meet the sea. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic engagements with the original “development deltas” of Post-Mao China linking coastal SEZs (Special Economic Zones) along the Pearl, Min and Yangtze rivers to global exchange, this talk offers an estuarial take on what scholars of modernity and supply chain capitalism have described as a “liquid” world full of uncertainty and volatility. But in lieu of a theory of universal flux, the talk focuses on the temporal politics of constancy that make fluvial landscapes thinkable in terms of supply chai

ns and in turn, actionable as valued lifeways to be developed and sustained along the logistical junctures of upstream, downstream and the offshore.

Julie Y. Chu is a sociocultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago and author of Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010). Her current writing project is entitled The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China’s Global Edge. Based on three years of fieldwork largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers traversing the Taiwan Strait, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific (via ports and border zones spanning the PRC and the U.S.), this work examines how certain figures of “infrastructure” animate the global politics of time in three distinct keys – as matters of constancy, rhythm and non/event.

This event is organized by Dodom Kim (Assistant Professor, Sophia University).