Containerisation: Moving Things and Boxing Ideas

This paper contrasts the standard account of the relationship between containerisation and globalisation with a picture of multiple mobilities and moorings. I suggest that an account of containerisation cannot so easily be contained because sameness, security, plenty and economic rationality have also produced the aporias of difference, danger and emptiness as well as a diverse range of cultural representations. I take this to be a specific representation of a more general argument against the reduction in complex social and material mobilities to a determinist account of technology or a teleological version of history.