This post is part of a series about the “Mutual Interests: Collaboration Across the Arts and Humanities” exhibition developed by faculty in the Society, Technology, and Environment Cluster at Grand Valley State University.

A Shipping Manifest is a collaborative project and digital print installation by Tierney S. Powell, PhD and Wenxin Zhao |  Digital Design and Production: Wenxin Zhao

A Shipping Manifest is a digital print installation that uses logistics as a lens to examine the impact of corporatized higher education, “from the individual to the systemic—from the personal experiences of academic work to the business logics that manage it.”¹ Logistics is the organizational thinking behind global supply chains. Ideas such as “efficiency” and “optimization” underpin the manufacturing and distribution of just about everything. But these business management logics are also increasingly found in the strategic planning of university administrators. How might we think of the logistics of producing and distributing knowledge—a college education, a liberal arts education, a public education—and what happens to the laborers who do it? A Shipping Manifest exposes how the conditions of academic work are not only like but subject to these corporate logics.

Using imagery from package delivery, A Shipping Manifest depicts teaching and service as educational products in transit. Teaching and service are two broad genres of labor for academics. These roles require the preparation for and teaching of classes, student assessment, mentoring, committee work, contributing to institutional initiatives, among a vast array of responsibilities. A Shipping Manifest registers a double meaning in the image of the embodied-emboxed: to be in the box, the knowledge-product being distributed, and to be the box, the medium delivering academic knowledge. The image resonates with the ways in which “the modeling of one’s personal and social identity, has been reorganized to conform to the uninterrupted operation of markets, information networks, and other systems,” as Jonathan Crary writes in his work on late capitalism and sleep cultures.² In order to deliver—or be delivered as—an educational product in the contemporary marketplace of higher education, an academic worker must be available to and accountable for intensifying workplace demands. But even as the image tracks the academic worker, it also obscures her. The academic-researcher is entirely absent; the elision exposes the difficulty of maintaining a research agenda amid increasing workloads. The rightmost figure, her face blurred, receives a “404: Error” message, a diagnosis of a broken link between the conditions of labor and one’s sense of self. 

“Accomplish more with less” is one of the celebrated “Leadership Principles” of Amazon, the paradigmatic logistics company. This principle enables Amazon to constrict budgets and to surveil, automate, and outsource work. “Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention,” the Leadership Principles state. Universities across the US use a similar language. Austerity, waste-elimination, and the pursuit of efficiencies are rationalized as entrepreneurialism, a recalibration towards market alignment, and “right-sizing.”  Shrinking public funding for higher education has transformed how universities allocate monies, identify “performance indicators,” set priorities, and manage operational costs. As Peter Fleming writes in Dark Academia: How Universities Die, “starving institutions of proper funding compelled them to compete for students in a global marketplace, overhauling their management structures as if they were corporations.”³ And what emerges in this shift toward corporate logics is a strategic conflation and fundamental antagonism between education as a public good and education as a good to be sold to the public. 

In this framework, higher education seeks competitive advantage over other institutions, often pursuing marketable new initiatives targeting increases in student credit hours. In recent years, these marketable initiatives have turned to EdTech, what Matt Seybold describes as “enterprises, most owned by venture capital and private equity, whose mission is to automate and gigify education, to surveil students, mine their data and modify their behavior.”⁴ The EdTech boom has been bolstered by the US federal administration; Executive Order 14277 incentivizes integration, training, and marketing of artificial intelligence in education through, among other tactics, “establish[ing] public-private partnerships with leading AI industry organizations.”⁵ As Annie McClanahan and Louise McCune write, forms of EdTech “will increase the economic ‘productivity’ of teaching by enabling economies of scale and providing an alibi for other austerity measures; by providing a mechanism for the capture of instructors’ intellectual property; and by rationalizing, deskilling, and even fully automating the labor of teaching.”⁶ The scaled, packaging, and automated content delivery in higher education marks an escalation in business-thinking across universities. And such a model for education becomes increasingly rationalized under conditions of fiscal (and social) crisis within and beyond institutions of higher education. Anna Kornbluh recognized this in the context of COVID-19 as enabling “shock doctrine” tactics for radically reorganizing and in so doing redefining the role of universities and the labor that is fundamental to them.⁷

Higher education workers experience varying degrees of precarity and managerial oversight in their working lives. This is true for workers subject to corporatist logics in job sectors across the world. As an international, junior faculty member and woman in academia, Wenxin Zhao, the graphic designer behind A Shipping Manifest, connected her personal experiences of work to research data on academics with similar identity profiles. Amid the imperatives to quantify and optimize her labor, Zhao identified (with) compounding social, cultural, and institutional strains on time, labor, resources, and overall experiences of academic employment. Such factors, including “sponsored dependency” and “stereotypical perception,” emblematize how many “international academic workers face the additional bureaucratic, administrative, and emotional labor of navigating institutional and immigration systems.”⁸ As Gary Rhoades points out in Academe, while “demographics are not determinative,” they are “linked to a sense of injustice.”⁹ We can trace how historic and ongoing forms of inequality exist in the everyday structures and cultures of higher education. While quantification and documentation of performance are part of a regular practice in institutions of higher education, for many marginalized and underrepresented faculty members, there are hidden forms and conditions of labor for which there is little to no accounting. 

Inspired by the idea of a shipping manifest, a record of cargo in transit, A Shipping Manifest critiques the calculative logic of the manifest—the rendering of data and inventory—by revealing forms of data that are regularly left off it. On the right side of the image, a handwritten inventory of healthcare visits and wellness services offer a glimpse into what Tithi Bhattacharya calls “existence beyond the workplace.” These services represent what is needed to produce (and sustain) the academic worker. “If workers produce commodities,” Bhattacharya asks, “who produces the workers?”¹⁰ Thus, one is invited to see this “alternative” inventory as a subversion of institutional forms of labor-tracking. And, still, one might also question whether A Shipping Manifest ends up expanding practices of human measurement and deepening a neoliberal practice of individuated tracking and self-optimization.

Indeed “making visible” is only one intervention A Shipping Manifest makes in theorizing academic work. Another is an engagement, again, with “manifest”—as in, to manifest. The shift from noun to verb initiates action, the imaginative possibility of enactment. “To manifest means visualizing and in so doing making possible potentialities—future projections.”¹¹ Our collaboration on  A Shipping Manifest necessitated taking different critical approaches and commitments and bringing them together through years of conversations and coffee, of mapping ideas, of working through the fun and frustrations of communication, of trying to set and maintain expectations, of sharing with vulnerability the experiences of work. A Shipping Manifest raises awareness about the individual, embodied experience of academic work, but it also asserts that the scale of the system is not a foreclosed terrain for actually enacting academia otherwise. What happens when we, borrowing  from Caroline Levine, “hinge” the diverse experiences of academic labor together? A hinge is a “particular form that organizes materials across different disciplines and domains. A hinge is a site that links two distinct things or spaces, each with its own identity.”¹² The hinge is a kind of infrastructure—and it also hails a deeply logistical vision. But it is a logistical vision operating by other values, by other logics. 

As I’ve argued elsewhere, logistics, like infrastructure, isn’t inherently bad (exploitative, extractive). We need organizational systems to convey and distribute materials, to enable fair work. Institutional investments in meaningful collaboration, such as was enabled by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Cluster in Society, Technology, and the Environment, create the opportunity to think relationally, to build relationships through and with our work. But beyond the work of our interdisciplinary cluster, A Shipping Manifest represents the need to hinge the diverse experiences of all academic workers together; the need for forms to link, mediate, and organize; the need for academic workers to have power over the conditions of their labor; the need to build a collective future for higher education. 

1. Tierney Powell and Wenxin Zhao, “Project Description, A Shipping Manifest,” Mutual Interests: A Collaboration Across the Arts and Humanities, 2026 ↩︎
2. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013), 9. ↩︎
3. Peter Fleming, “Welcome to the Edu-Factory,” Dark Academia: How Universities Die (Pluto Press, 2021), 38. ↩︎
4. Matt Seybold, “Against Technofeudal Education,” The American Vandal, June 2025, https://www.theamericanvandal.com/p/against-technofeudal-education ↩︎
5. The White House, “Executive Order 14277” https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/advancing-artificial-intelligence-education-for-american-youth/ ↩︎
6. Annie McClanahan and Louise McCune, “EdTech,” University Keywords (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), 176. ↩︎
7. Anna Kornbluh, “Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2020 https://www.chronicle.com/article/academes-coronavirus-shock-doctrine/ ↩︎
8. Ketevan Mamiseishvili and Vicki J. Rosser, “International and Citizen Faculty in the United States: An Examination of Their Productivity at Research Universities,” Research in Higher Education, 51(1):88-107, 2010; Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism (Routledge, 2008). Research quoted by Wenxin Zhao in concept design for A Shipping Manifest. Tierney Powell and Wenxin Zhao, “Project Description, A Shipping Manifest,” Mutual Interests: A Collaboration Across the Arts and Humanities, 2026. ↩︎
9. Gary Roades, “How Academic Workers Have Reenergized the Labor Movement,” Academe, Winter 2026. https://www.aaup.org/issue/winter-2026/how-academic-workers-have-reenergized-labor-movement ↩︎
10. Tithi Bhattacharya, “How Not To Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class,” Viewpoint Mag, 2015. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/how-not-to-skip-class-social-reproduction-of-labor-and-the-global-working-class/#f+5148+1+7   ↩︎
11. Tierney Powell and Wenxin Zhao, “Project Description, A Shipping Manifest,” Mutual Interests: A Collaboration Across the Arts and Humanities, 2026 ↩︎
12. Caroline Levine, “Political Forms That Work,” The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, Princeton UP, 2023, p. 134. ↩︎

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Tierney Powell

Tierney S. Powell is Assistant Professor of English at Grand Valley State University. Her current book project argues that contemporary literature, television, and film theorize and imagine alternatives to logistics, the spatial practice and organizational logic of ecocidal global commodity chains. This project extends from research and teaching specializing in multiethnic literature, critical infrastructure and urban studies, environmental criticism, and spatial theory. Her work appears in Voices and Visions: Essays on New Orleans's Literary History (University Press of Mississippi 2025) and an American Book Review issue, Focus: Supply Chains (2025).

Latest posts by Tierney Powell (see all)

• “A Shipping Manifest” and the Logistics of Higher Education - November 11, 2026
• On the Waterfront: Mapping Logistical Contagion as Environmental Crisis in HBO’s Station Eleven - September 10, 2025