This PhD project explores the museological potential of a critical understanding of logistics, stemming from critical geography, Marxist political economy, postcolonial studies, media studies, and cultural theory. Logistics is hence understood as an operative logic that organizes flows of commodities and capital, but also of bodies and subjectivities, on multiple spatial scales according to a paradigm of circulation and connectivity, often proceeding with extreme force and violence.

Through ethnographic explorations in various museums, the project asks to what extent the museal narration of global commodity flows corresponds to such an understanding of logistics or can be criticized from such angle. On the other hand, it asks about the logistical dimension of museum practices such as exhibiting, collecting, and designing themselves, since these also follow certain logics of circulation and distribution – of bodies and objects in space, but also of discourses, affects, and experiences. Hence, the PhD project makes productive the field of tension between the "musealization of logistics" on the one hand and the "logistics of the museum" on the other.

The methodological approach is described best as ethnographically informed theory. The empirical material, collected through qualitative methods of field research and museum analysis, is confronted with theoretical concepts from critical logistics studies and museology, aiming towards a museological conception of logistics, resp. a logistical museology. By linking discourses of logistical theory and museum studies, the project contributes to the critical analysis of globalized capitalism under a logistical paradigm. It expands the focus of critical logistics studies beyond its economic context of origin and tests its application to aesthetic and discursive phenomena of the museum. At the same time, this strengthens a museological angle of analysis that shifts the focus from the examination of singular exhibitions or displays toward their relational modes of operation and functional logics.