10:00: Trial lecture
12:00: Public defence
Trial lecture title: "Critical reflections on the concept of skill in maritime labour".
Ordinary opponents:
- First opponent: Associate professor Massimiliano Nicola Mollona, University of Bologna
- Second opponent: Senior researcher Jessica Larsen, Danish Institute for International Studies
- Leader of the committee: Professor emeritus Nils Gilje, The Centre for the Study of Profession
Leader of the public defence is Beate Elvebakk, director of the Centre of the Study of Professions, OsloMet
Supervisors:
- Professor Anne Leseth, OsloMet
- Associate Professor, Elisabeth Schober
Abstract
This dissertation is an anthropological study of the organisation of maritime work and life among seafarers in different parts of the world. It discusses the labour experiences of seafarers, whose everyday work within a highly regulated, spatially bounded, and ethnically stratified work environment is an integral—even crucial—part of the global economy.
Up to 90 percent of world trade is carried by the international shipping industry, which means that without movement and circulation at sea, ‘half the world would starve, and the other half would freeze’. Despite the essential role that seafarers play in what is arguably the most globalised of all industries, the (non-) attention given to them and their work in operating the ships that carry goods across the world’s oceans is disproportionate to their importance.
Based on ethnographic research conducted aboard a contemporary cargo vessel crewed by seafarers of mixed nationalities, this dissertation sheds light on the labour required to make a ship ‘work’ and demonstrates how explorations of the tensions between the standardised, formalised, and theoretical measures of work on the one hand and the individual, personal, experiential, and practical aspects of work on the other hand can offer a new perspective on maritime work.
By investigating labour standardisation and bureaucratisation in shipping labour and the way in which this labour is organised and structured, this dissertation elucidates the ‘invisible’ work undertaken by seafarers, as well as the multiple ideologies that surround their work and work practices, and the everyday strategies that they implement to render their time at sea more bearable and sustainable.
One of the central arguments of this study is that the formal structure of shipboard labour and its institutionalised organisation on the one hand and the informal structure of shipboard labour and its social organisation on the other hand intersect with and are interconnected with one another. In my exploration and analysis of onboard social relations and the everyday negotiation and organisation of work, I reveal how seafarers—despite their unequally distributed positions, power, and conditions of employment—manage to keep a vessel afloat and contribute to the apparently unimpeded transportation of goods.
