Upcoming book will explore the challenges facing global dependence on e-commerce.
With expertise across a range of fields including history, media studies, and science, Miriam Posner explores the ways that data and technology shape everyday life. The UCLA associate professor of information studies will take a deep dive into supply-chain management with her forthcoming book, “Seeing Like a Supply Chain,” to be released by Yale University Press.
At UCLA, Posner served as core faculty in the Program in Digital Humanities from 2012 to 2017, when she joined the faculty of the UCLA Department of Information Studies. She has twice been a principal investigator of the “Beyond the Digitized Slide – Library Summer Institute on Digital Humanities and Art History,” funded by the Getty Foundation, and also was co-PI for “Advancing Project-Based Learning through Apprenticeships and Capstone Courses in the Digital Humanities Minor,” funded by the UCLA Office of Instructional Development. In addition, Posner received a grant from the UCLA Faculty Senate Committee on Research and has taken part in the UCLA Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovation in the Classroom Initiative. Most recently, Professor Posner was honored as a 2023-24 National Humanities Center Fellow, for her project on “Seeing Like a Supply Chain: The Hidden Life of Logistics.”
Professor Posner’s courses have delineated some of the most pressing topics in the digital realm, including “Data, Justice, and Society,” “Selfies, Snapchat, and Cyberbullies: Coming of Age Online,” “Museums in the Digital Age,” and “Digital Labor, Materiality, and Urban Space.” She has delivered a number of keynotes at international conferences including the Dédalo Conference on Cultural Heritage in Valencia, Spain; “Navigating Uncertainty: Preparing Society for the Future” at the University of Bielefeld in Bielefeld, Germany; and the Barnard College Center for Empirical Research 10th Anniversary in New York City. Posner has contributed articles to numerous journals, including the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing; Logic(s) Magazine; and Postmodern Culture. She has also contributed book chapters to “Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data,” published by MIT Press; and “The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice,” published by Routledge.
Professor Posner achieved her PhD in film studies and American studies at Yale University, and her BA in history at Reed College in Portland, Ore.
What intrigues you about supply chain management?
Miriam Posner: I got interested in it when I was teaching a class on digital labor at UCLA. I knew that since the growth of globalization in the 1990s, supply chain management has exploded as a profession. My students and I were used to seeing Amazon trucks and container ports, but I was confused about how the whole thing worked. I wanted to understand how all this activity was coordinated. Since I’m a technology person, I was really interested in technologically, how you coordinate the movement of all these goods all over the world, and what I found was really surprising to me.
I learned that most companies don’t have much insight into their own supply chains – that they rely on the supply chains to kind of run themselves. The way this works is that a brand will subcontract with what they call a tier-one vendor, someone who perhaps assembles the products. That vendor contracts with its own array of sub-vendors, and on and on and on and on, across the globe. These sub-vendors can get swapped in or out at any time without anyone becoming aware of it. Things move very quickly, but no one along the chain has much insight into how the whole thing is moving.
I thought that was really interesting because as consumers, we’ve become accustomed to being able to track our packages in near[ly] real time as they arrive at our doorstep and yet, so few of us know anything about where our products are made. That’s what got me interested in writing the book: How did we get here and what kind of computer systems support this understanding of supply chain management?
How did the pandemic and the sudden overnight dependence on online retail affect your research – or did it?
Posner: I had been at that point working on the book for quite a while and so, I should have been prepared for what happened during the pandemic. But just like everyone else, [I was] totally dependent on these supply networks and I was scrambling as much as anyone else was. But I did understand how easily something like this could happen, not only because as we heard, there was a logjam of ships and containers at the Los Angeles port, but also brands were struggling with the fact that they didn’t know what kinds of threats lurk within their own supply chains.
When Chinese factories closed, for example, a lot of brands discovered to their dismay that their products were in part assembled in China, and they only learned this when those parts failed to materialize. The other thing [the pandemic] did for supply chain management is that it really put SCM on the map and this profession whose members were used to toiling in obscurity, was suddenly the focus of a lot of attention and interest. That was useful to me, because there was a lot more coverage of supply chains.
Are these threats to SCM continuing?
Posner: The conundrum that they’re dealing with is that the world is increasingly unpredictable because of climate change and geopolitical conflict. There are innumerable threats to an efficient supply chain all over the world and at the same time, as they know that the world is becoming more perilous, they have given up on understanding their own supply chains. You have on the one hand, total opacity when it comes to the supply chain and on the other hand, a very dangerous world. A system that had pretty much worked for a few decades is now coming under a lot of strain as the world gets more complicated and for supply chains, more dangerous.
As a historian, do you see parallels between this and other periods in time? Do you see any solutions in those parallels?
Posner: I think this particular political [and] economic configuration is unprecedented. Supply chain management, defined as legally separate vendors locked into a subordinate relationship, is an invention of the 20th Century and so, we haven’t been here before. There’s a lot of uncertainty as to whether our current arrangement will be able to survive the threats that it’s facing. People have sold and transported goods across the globe for as long as [they] have existed, but this particular legal and economic arrangement wherein companies – mostly in the global north – lock sub vendors into a subordinate but legally separate relationship, is new.
What industries do you find this being affected the most?
Posner: We’ve all been aware of the semiconductor industry, which is in some ways exceptional because it’s the focus of so much attention among national governments and the question of who produces a chip is to a great extent, a matter of national pride.
Our ability to buy things like refrigerators and cars has been affected because semiconductors are integrated into so many technologies that we use today. But like every other item that travels along the supply chain, it’s stitched deeply into international networks. And so, semiconductors like everything else, are as vulnerable to the vicissitudes of a dangerous world, as is every other product.
Let’s talk a little bit about digital humanities. How do you think the era of AI is affecting that or redefining it?
Posner: I think to some extent it’s forcing scholars to be explicit about why it is that the way humanists think is different from the way computers think. Now that chatbots can produce convincing simulacra of human language, it’s become incumbent upon people who study the humanities to demonstrate why what we do is specific to human ways of thinking.
In digital humanities, scholars use digital tools to explore humanities questions, and I think all of us are having to make a decision about how willing we are to use every digital tool, and where we might feel compelled to draw a line through certain technologies.
Is it possible to draw a line at this point?
Posner: That’s a good question. My experience of AI, specifically large language models, has been that the technology … will try to claim every domain as its territory and it will claim that territory to the extent that we allow it. It becomes our responsibility to push back in a forceful and convincing way against claims that it can replicate the kind of work we do.
How does your research inform your teaching?
Posner: I’m teaching a class this quarter called “Data From the Margins” this spring, about how marginalized communities have thought about and pushed back against data in order to advocate for themselves. And I just finished co-teaching a two-quarter cluster course called “Data, Justice, and Society,” about the relationship between those three forces.
We talked about where data come[s] from … where does the idea that it makes sense to divide the world up into data come from, and how does it affect the way we see the world? For example, how did we decide that it makes sense to categorize people by race, and put those categories in a spreadsheet? How does that affect the way that we understand our relationships to each other? And how does it affect the way we build a society together?
It’s really a pleasure to think through that with undergrads who are, sometimes for the first time, questioning the ubiquity of data as an organizing strategy. It’s wonderful to have a space for them to really consider the air that they breathe.
Photo by Amelia Burns