ILLRN Seminar

Storage areas occupy privileged positions in abandoned territories, where they form veritable enclaves outside local law. They are also places of innovation that reveal real changes in labour relations and the organisation of labour markets. Because they combine rational stock management, employment flexibility and multi-scalarity of distribution channels, these areas are privileged spaces-time for understanding the changes underway in transnational economies. This presentation will explore these issues by drawing on La logistique et ses monstres [Logistics and Its Monsters] (Éditions du Croquant, 2024), the first volume in the Le Grand Entrepôt [The Large Warehouse] collection. The book stems from the interdisciplinary research project Le Grand Entrepôt [The Large Warehouse], funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), and coordinated by the Laboratory of Economics and Sociology of Work (LEST) and the Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO). The project investigates the political economy of storage and logistics and its role in shaping new global economic worlds, labour regimes, and spatial reconfigurations.


Delphine Mercier is a sociologist and Director of Research at the CNRS in France, based at the Laboratory of Economics and Sociology of Work (LEST), currently affiliated with the Maison Française d’Oxford (CNRS, MFO) in Oxford. She specializes in issues of migration and labour in contexts of globalization, particularly in Latin America, Europe, North Africa, and more recently the Middle East. Her research focuses on transnational labour markets, especially in zones of exception such as free zones and special economic areas. She has coordinated or co-coordinated several international programmes, and she is currently leading an ANR programme LE GRAND ENTREPÔT ‘The Large Warehouse. An Emerging Storage Industry: Markets, Economic Organisations and Networks’, in partnership between Maison Francaise d’Oxford and the Laboratory of Economics and Sociology of Work. Her publications include Experiencing Ruptures in Migration: Ordinary and Unexpected Journeys of Global Migrants (with V. Zuñiga, K. Doraï, M. El Miri, and M. Peraldi, Transnational Press London, 2022); Frontières en travail. Migrations, travail et fabrique des frontières. Amérique Centrale, Maghreb et Moyen Orient [Borders at Work: Migration, Labour and the Making of Borders in Central America, the Maghreb and the Middle East] (with M. El Miri and M. Peraldi, Karthala, 2020