Charmaine Chua’s keynote presentation examines how logistics and e-commerce shape urban life, focusing on working-class experiences and global supply chains. She discusses the evolution of consumer behavior due to platforms like Amazon and the ethical implications of consumption. Her case study of Los Angeles highlights the city’s prominent role in global shipping logistics role, advocating for worker solidarity and the need for collective action in addressing systemic issues.
Charmaine Chua is a Singaporean organizer and writer, and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her scholarship and political work is interested in how planetary supply chains shape racialized and class inequalities under global capitalism, with specific attention to how these divisions are lived, contested, and overcome by anti-colonial and anti-capitalist social movements. She is currently writing two books, The Logistics Counterrevolution: Fast Circulation, Slow Violence and the Transpacific Empire of Circulation, and How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America’s New Working Class (co-authored with Spencer Cox). Her work has been published in The Review of International Studies, The Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, Society and Space, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Jacobin, among other venues. She co-founded the Marxist Institute of Research, and organizes with Workers In Palestine, Cops off Campus, and Amazonians United, an independent union of Amazon warehouse workers. In 2023, Chua was named a Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar, in recognition of movement leaders in academia who have a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements.
