Empire Logistics Group

Juliann Emmons Allison
Political Science
UC Riverside

Catherine Gudis
History
UC Riverside

Empire Logistics Group (ELG) is a contextual for public dialog on the impact of the logistics industry on Inland Southern California. It constructs the logistics industry as the movement of conceptual, digitized containers from ships in the Long Beach Harbor-Port of Los Angeles complex onto freight trucks and rails, through a series of warehouses, to destinations across the country. It consists of three -integrated ways of containing the issue: (1) interdisciplinary, community-based research on the economic, socio-political, and environmental effect of moving goods through a highly populated, ethnically and environmentally diverse, and congested region; (2) participant observation as social activism to connect with people who depend on or are affected by the logistics industry, and lend credibility to findings about communities in Inland Southern California; and (3) a digital intermodal freight container as conceptual platform from which to rethink and reconstruct the contemporary logistics industry.