The port is not a neutral site
I went to the Ports of Antwerp, Shanghai, and the San Pedro Bay complex (Los Angeles and Long Beach) to study labour. My initial imagination of a port was shaped by dominant literature: ports as infrastructures, logistics zones, sites of flow, places of movement, and economic exchange.[1] But some of these assumptions on what a port is did not hold because what I encountered was not just movement, but also containment, classification, porosity, and hierarchies of who is recognised as a port worker.[2]
This piece argues that the port is not simply a space where goods and passengers pass through. Rather, it is a place where categories are made and enforced, shaping who counts as port worker and who remains excluded. This argument guides the reflections that follow.
The first border
The first border I encountered was not a fence. It was a question “who is a port worker?” At first glance, this seems simple, administrative, technical, or even semantics in character. But in practice, it becomes a legal, spatial, and a moral boundary. Some workers are formally recognised, for example dockworkers, while others are not such as truck drivers, warehouse workers, cleaners, subcontracted workers and care workers who sustain port activities. And yet, all of them are necessary. So, the question shifts: who is allowed to belong to the category of “port workers”?
Mamdani at the docks
Mamdani writes about the making of permanent minorities. Not minorities as demographic facts, but as political and legal constructions.[3] He shows that in colonial contexts, the distinction between settler and native becomes institutionalised: fixed, governed, and reproduced over time. This is not just about identity. It is about power structured through law.
In the context of ports, the distinction between recognised and non-recognised port labour begins to look familiar. Over time the legal frameworks that define who counts, the institutional arrangements that stabilise those definitions, and the exclusions they produce become normalised. As a result, some workers become permanently peripheral to the recognised category of “port workers” that nevertheless depends on them. The port thus emerges as a site of differentiation.
The port as a regime of differentiation
Fieldwork across the three sites revealed that the port operates as a regime. This regime differentiates by contract (permanent v temporary), by space (inside v outside), by function (core v peripheral labour), and by visibility (counted v uncounted work). These distinctions are not merely technical but are also deeply political because they determine access to worker protection, access to recognition, and access to collective identity.
Methodology breaks here
I entered the field with a question: “who is a port worker?” I left with a different one: “how is port work produced, and who is excluded in the process?” The shift in question matters. This is because the first question assumes that the category exists, and it can be discovered. The second recognises that the category is constructed and it must be interrogated.
Double critique
Khatibi develops a double critique by challenging both the dominance of Western epistemologies and the ways in which they are internalised and reproduced in postcolonial contexts, refusing the idea of a pure alternative and instead emphasizing multiplicity and relational thinking.[4] What this meant is that I could not simply critique the law without also questioning how I was using legal categories in my own analytical practice. Research-wise, this requires continuously questioning not only what is being studied, but also how the act of studying itself may reproduce the very categories and exclusions it seeks to critique.
Fieldwork as a site of epistemic struggle
Some interviews with port stakeholders were not linear and did not fit easily into predefined categories. A cleaner working within the port area told me, “I work here, but in official port statistics I am not part of the port.” Another participant explained that “I work in a warehouse a stone-throw away from the port, but officially I am not a port worker because the warehouse is outside the spatial boundaries of the port. However, the work that I do is similar to the work carried out in warehouses within the port’s spatial boundaries.”
At first, these statements look contradictory, but they are not. Rather, they reflect forms of knowledge produced within fragmented structures where legal, spatial, and institutional boundaries do not align with workers’ lived experiences. Workers belong and do not belong, labour is central and marginal, identities are claimed and disclaimed. These statements resist classification. They disrupt the neat categories often found in scholarly literature on ports.
These forms of knowledge, grounded in multiplicity, resonates with Khatibi’s notion of Other Thought, which refuses purity and calls for multiplicity, contradiction, and coexistence without resolution. [5] It also echoes Cusicanqui’s idea of ch’ixinakax: the coexistence of heterogenous elements that do not merge.[6] In this sense, methodologically, this requires that I as the researcher do not resolve the contradictions, but instead stay with them, allowing them to inform the data analysis.
Law is not just law
In ports, law does not simply regulate. It produces categories of existence. For example, in Antwerp, the legal frameworks define what counts as port work, where it is carried out and by whom, it structures access to employment and regulates entry into the labour pool.[7] In San Pedro Bay port complex, the collective agreements between International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Pacific Maritime Association shape hiring systems and access to port work.[8]
These legal frameworks do not just organise labour, they also result in recognition, exclusion, fragmentation, and invisibilisation of some categories of workers who contribute to port activities. However, these exclusions are not only legal or spatial but are also embedded in social relations particularly gendered divisions of labour that shape what is recognised as “work” in the first place.
Rethinking labour through the coloniality of gender
Drawing on Lugones, these patterns of exclusion can be understood through the lens of coloniality of gender.[9] Lugones challenges universal notions of gender. She shows how colonialism imposed hierarchical gender systems and divisions between productive and reproductive work. In ports, what counts as ‘real work’ is often masculinised and formalised. In contrast, the labour that sustains these activities is often feminised and erased.
For example, an interview with an informal food vendor next to the gate of a port terminal revealed the following: “I feed the dockworkers who work in this terminal, but I am not considered as part of the port.” Another participant noted that: “the spouses of seafarers and dockworkers are not considered as port workers but should be considered as such because of the nature of their spouses’ jobs like absence from home, working odd hours, and the fact that they support their families in the absence of their port worker spouses.” Similarly, an interview with a worker in a seafarer welfare centre revealed the constant interaction between the welfare centre and seafarers through provision of transportation to and from terminals, emotional support and chaplaincy services that sustain maritime labour.
These forms of social reproductive labour are essential to port operations, but they remain outside the formally recognised category of port work. Rather than asking whether social reproductive labour should be included as port work, fieldwork revealed that their exclusion reveals the limits of dominant definitions of port work, which systematically marginalise the social reproductive work that sustains the port.
Rethinking port-centric workers
My research introduces and develops the concept of “port-centric workers” as a way of reconceptualising port work. I draw on and repurpose the logistics term ‘port-centric’, which is used in transport and supply chain literature to describe cargo distribution strategies located near ports.[10] While this term is used in logistics, I extend it into a socio-spatial category of labour.
In doing so, the focus shifts from questions of location such as “where is a warehouse located?” to questions of labour and power such as “whose labour keeps the port alive, why is some of it recognised, and why is other work invisibilised or erased”. In this sense, I conceptualise port-centric workers as an analytical tool for recognising the unrecognised and making visible those who are excluded from dominant definitions of port work. As such, port workers must include those inside port gates, those outside but sustaining port operations, and those whose labour is not formally recognised as “port labour” but whose activities contribute to port operations.[11] This is not just an analytical move to expand the category of port workers. It is a decolonial methodological intervention that exposes the limits of existing legal and spatial definitions of port work which prioritise certain forms of waged, visible, unionised, and spatially bounded labour while excluding others that are equally necessary.
These transitions are not only structural but are also experienced. Drawing on Icaza & Vazquez, vulnerability is not simply an individual condition but is shaped by coloniality.[12] In my interviews, vulnerability has appeared as hesitation, uncertainty and self-doubt. For example, when migrant students working in warehouses said “I am a migrant and do not speak the dominant language well therefore I don’t know if I am a port worker…” This is not ignorance. It is the effect of structural exclusion from recognition and fragmentation of labour categories. Treating vulnerability as knowledge therefore means recognising expressions such as hesitation, ambiguity or uncertainty as insight into how power operates rather than as a lack of understanding.
Knowledge is relational
This also requires rethinking how knowledge itself is produced. As Sheehy & Nayak remind us, knowledge is collective, embodied and emerges through struggle.[13] In port contexts, knowledge is often not formalised. It circulates through conversations, shared experiences, and informal networks. As a result, this challenges extractive research models that places participants as sources of data to be collected. In the three sites, I participated in a relational process of meaning-making and was not simply collecting data. Workers articulated tensions between attachment and detachment, belonging and exclusion, dependence and resistance, through which knowledge about the port is co-produced.
Law, space and capital (together)
Port work is shaped by legal frameworks, spatial arrangements, and economic systems. These three elements are not separate: they are co-constitutive.
Law defines categories.[14] Space enforces boundaries,[15] while capital drives organisation.[16] Together, they produce fragmented labour identities.
This fragmentation of labour identities results in ambivalent belonging within and across ports. Workers are simultaneously inside and outside, recognised and unrecognised, or central and peripheral. This is not a contradiction to be resolved. It is a condition of existence within contemporary ports.
Methodology, discomfort and coloniality
My research does not aim to fix categories, stabilise definitions, or produce clean conclusions. Instead, it seeks to trace processes of classification, reveal structures of exclusion, and centre lived experience of people who contribute to port operations. It is therefore interdisciplinary, relational, and deliberately unfinished.
Decoloniality produces discomfort. It requires questioning assumptions, destabilising knowledge, and acknowledging complicity. As a result, in my research on port work categories collapse, clarity becomes elusive, and certainty is replaced by tension. This is not a failure but is consistent with what decoloniality requires. That is commitment to question categories, to centre marginalised voices, and to remain accountable.
In conclusion, ports are not edges but are sites of encounter, conflict, and possibility. Ports are also places where labour, law and power are organised, and where inclusion and exclusion are actively produced.
To study ports differently, we must also know differently. This means expanding who counts as a worker, recognising invisible labour, and challenging legal and spatial exclusions.
It also requires an acceptance that our work will remain unfinished, contested, and alive.
[1] Brian Larkin, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’ (2013) 42 Annual Review of Anthropology 327 <https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522>; Michiel Nidjam and Martin van der Horst, ‘Port Definition, Concepts and the Role of Ports in Supply Chains’ Ports and Networks: Strategies, Operations and Perspectives (1st edn, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2018); Wayne K Talley, Port Economics (2nd edn, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2018).
[2] Charmaine Chua and others, ‘Introduction: Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics’ (2018) 36 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 617 <https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818783101>; Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (University of Minnesota Press 2014) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt7zw6vg> accessed 15 January 2024; Carola Hein, ‘Temporalities of the Port, the Waterfront and the Port City’ <https://portusonline.org/temporalities-of-the-port-the-waterfront-and-the-port-city/?pdf=13213> accessed 16 October 2024.
[3] Mahmood Mamdani, ‘The Israel/Palestine Question’ Neither Settler Nor Native – The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (1st edn, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2020) <https://www.theleftberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Neither_Settler_nor_Native_The_Making_and_Unmaking_of_Permanent.pdf>.
[4] Abdelkebir Khatibi, ‘Double Critique’ Plural Maghreb – Writing on Postcolonialism (Bloomsbury Academic 2019) <https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781350053960_A35838470/preview-9781350053960_A35838470.pdf>.
[5] Abdelkebir Khatibi, ‘Other Thought’ Plural Maghreb – Writing on Postcolonialism (1st edn, Bloomsbury Academic 2019) <https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781350053960_A35838470/preview-9781350053960_A35838470.pdf>.
[6] Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization’ (2012) 111 South Atlantic Quarterly 95 <https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1472612>.
[7] Andrea Bottalico, ‘Towards a Common Trajectory of Port Labour Systems in Europe? The Case of the Port of Antwerp’ (2020) 8 Case Studies on Transport Policy 311 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cstp.2019.12.003>; Theo Notteboom, ‘Dock Labour and Port Related Employment in the European Seaport System – Key Factors to Port Competitiveness’ (2010) <https://www.espo.be/media/espopublications/ITTMAReportonDockLabourand2010.pdf> accessed 16 November 2023.
[8] Edna Bonacich and Jake B Wilson, Getting the Goods – Port, Labour, and the Logistics Revolution (1st edn, Cornell University Press 2008).
[9] María Lugones, ‘Gender and Universality in Colonial Methodology’ (2020) 8 Critical Philosophy of Race 25 <https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.8.1-2.0025>.
[10] Robert Mason, Stephen Pettit and Anthony Beresford, ‘Port-Centric Logistics: The Seaport versus Inland Location Dilemma’ Port Management: Cases in Port Geography, Operations and Policy (1st edn, Kogan Page Limited 2018); Theo Notteboom and Jean-Paul Rodrigue, ‘Port Regionalization: Towards a New Phase in Port Development’ (2007) 32 Maritime Policy and Management 297.
[11] Chua and others (n 2).
[12] Rosalba Icaza and Rolando Vázquez, ‘Vulnerability and the Coloniality of Performativity’ (2025) 22 Globalizations 1259 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2025.2491972>.
[13] Chris Sheehy and Suryia Nayak, ‘Black Feminist Methods of Activism Are the Tool for Global Social Justice and Peace’ (2020) 40 Critical Social Policy 234 <https://doi.org/10.1177/0261018319896231>.
[14] Elena Baglioni, ‘Labour Control and the Labour Question in Global Production Networks: Exploitation and Disciplining in Senegalese Export Horticulture’ (2018) 18 Journal of Economic Geography 111 <https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbx013>.
[15] Noel Castree and others, Spaces of Work: Global Capitalism and the Geographies of Labour (1st edn, SAGE Publications 2004); Andrew Herod, ‘Workers, Space, and Labor Geography’ (2003) 64 International Labor and Working-Class History 112 <https://doi.org/10.1017/s014754790300022x>.
[16] Neil M Coe and David C Jordhus-Lier, ‘Constrained Agency? Re-Evaluating the Geographies of Labour’ (23 April 2010) <https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510366746> accessed 7 March 2025; Gary Gereffi, ‘Global Value Chains, Development, and Emerging Economies’ Business and Development Studies – Issues and Perspectives (1st edn, Routledge Taylor & Francis 2020) <https://hdl.handle.net/10161/19752> accessed 14 April 2025.