Soundscapes of Global Production: an immersive remapping of Jordan’s largest clothing production zone

J: What made you create this interactive sonic map?

KG: The idea grew from a frustration with how global production sites are usually represented – through statistics, trade reports, or factory data that reduce workers’ lives to numbers. After two years of ethnographic research in Jordan’s clothing production zones, my goal was to make these spaces audible and visible in a different way. Sound proved to be a powerful way to convey the breathless rhythms and dense atmospheres of migrant workers’ lives inside Jordan’s walled industrial zones. The never-ending hum of sewing machines, the blare of loudspeakers advertising products in diverse South Asian languages, or the curfew bells of the dormitories tell complex stories about the labor that underpins our Nike shorts, or Timberland fleece jackets.

The interactive sound map allows listeners to step into secluded extra-territorial zones that typically remain inaccessible. Each red dot on the map opens a sonic window combining sound recordings and illustrations made in-situ. The audience hence discovers places and situations in migrant workers’ everyday life that capture experiences of confinement, exhaustion, as well as fleeting moments of joy. This provides intimate insights into the dormitory migrant labor regime that largely limits foreign workers’ movement to factories and dormitories, imposing hyper-intensive production rhythms. The interactive map challenges the static character of conventional cartography and experiments with a more sensory, affective way of documenting global clothing production and the labor that underpins it. 

Fig. 1 Garment workers walking back to dormitories after factory shifts. Illustration by ©2025 Mélanie Forné 

J: What particular topics and issues does this alternative mapping project address?

KG: The project foregrounds the everyday lives of migrant workers in Al-Hassan Industrial Zone, currently Jordan’s largest production hub for clothing. The garment factories located in Al-Hassan mainly belong to Transnational Corporations (TNCs) that are headquartered in South-East Asia and have relocated parts of their production to benefit from the Free Trade Agreement that allows garments made-in-Jordan to enter the US market duty free. This close-up portrayal of the industrial zone exposes the paradox that lies at the heart of globalisation and ‘free trade’ – namely the coexistence of hyper-mobility (of capital, production materials and workers) on the one hand; and immobility (in a labor regime that confines workers between dormitories and factories to heighten productivity) on the other hand.

Through immersive sonic and visual experiences, the map reveals how global economic processes translate into site-specific mechanisms of control, disciplining and exploitation. It captures how Jordan’s industrial zones – originally created to foster regional economic integration between Israel and Jordan – have turned into “extra-territorial” production spaces that offer considerable advantages to foreign investors producing clothing for export and employing a predominantly foreign workforce. The map invites listeners to step into what Shamel Azmeh has called “Asian enclaves on Jordanian territory”[i], as the vast majority of migrant workers recruited on 3-year contracts are from South Asia. The rhythms it conveys shed light on the extreme time pressures under which life unfolds, as workers are caught between endless factory shifts, overcrowded dormitories, and long queues in canteen spaces. Yet by zooming in on dense situations of everyday life, the map also highlights how workers carve out spaces of rest and sociability that provide temporary escape from the labor control regime that extends from factory floors to the dormitories. 

J: How does this illustrated sound map connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

KG: The project extends my ethnographic research on labour in global clothing production, particularly in Jordan’s export-oriented garment industry. When I began the sound mapping project, I had already spent one and a half years conducting fieldwork in different industrial zones across Jordan, as part of Invisible Women, Invisible Workers. My research explores the political economy of Jordan’s clothing industry – shaped by US free trade policies promoting Arab-Israeli normalization[ii] – and examines how the global garment production regime affects labouring bodies, especially within a dormitory system exploiting predominantly female, foreign workers (read more on Jadaliyya).

Like other Special Economic Zones (SEZs), Jordan’s clothing clusters form ‘extra-territorialities’: spaces integrated into global markets yet detached from the local economy and exempt from fiscal and labour regulations. Gaining access to these zones, however, revealed hyper-cosmopolitan urban spaces that defied conventional representations. This prompted me to remap them – not through planned infrastructures but from the informal sprawl at their edges. In collaboration with the Cairo-based collective 10 Tooba, we invited garment workers to create their own cartographic representations of their work and living environments in participatory workshops. The resulting counter-maps – multiple visualizations centering workers’ subjective experiences – defy conventional legibility.

The sound mapping project builds on and extends this counter-mapping work. It similarly foregrounds the voices and agency of those inhabiting global production spaces, this time evoking not only the spatial organization of the dormitory regime but also its dense sonic and visual atmospheres. 

J: How did this collaborative project between ethnographers, cartographers, and artists/illustrators come to be, and how was this experience?

KG: The project emerged from a shared curiosity about how different forms of knowledge — artistic, cartographic, and ethnographic — can converge to create new ways of seeing and hearing globalised production. This collaboration wasn’t about translating research into art — it was about co-producing a new form of representation, one that refuses academic neutrality and analytical distance. The architects’ and artists’ contributions profoundly reshaped how I think about sound and sketches as invaluable research data; and mapping as a powerful tool of storytelling.

The French ANR research project “The Large Warehouse” first brought me together with Taher Labadi (economist at IFPO), David Lagarde (cartographer and sound artist) and Mélanie Forné (graphic designer and illustrator), and allowed us to pilot collaborative research in and around Jordan’s only sea port Aqaba and the adjacent industrial zone in spring 2024. Taher and I set out to unpack the impacts of the red sea blockade on Aqaba and the export-oriented clothing sector[iii]. Mélanie joined our research encounters with her sketch book in hand, producing in-situ illustrations that captured details we had missed or new perspectives that enhanced our analysis. David, meanwhile, recorded the sonic universe of the sites we investigated, adding a new layer of storytelling through field recordings. Besides joint publications, this collaboration resulted in the co-production of a first videoclip, in which David combined sound recordings in a clothing factory with the drawings made by Melanie.

The idea of remapping the entire Al-Hassan industrial zone through sound and illustration was thus born out of this fruitful collaboration. During two weeks of joint in-situ research, recording and sketching with David and Melanie in Al-Hassan in April 2025, we combined distinct but complementary perspectives: the ethnographic fieldwork and relationships I had built over preceding years; Mélanie’s unique brushstroke; and David Lagarde’s expertise in cartography and sound recording. A fourth colleague’s work was then indispensable to building an interactive, virtual sound map from the texts and sound clips we had produced. Sara Lana, artist and interactive web designer, is behind the beautiful and user-friendly design and interface of the final map. 

J: Reflecting on the project, how do you see this collaboration — with its melding of methods and perspectives — having shaped the end product? Are there aspects that particularly benefited from this process?

KG: None of us could have produced this interactive sound map alone, and it is a true collaborative effort born primarily out of two intense weeks of work in Al-Hassan industrial zone. Post-production – of texts, images and sound – started simultaneously in our rented Irbid apartment.

With our different microphones and recording devices; and sketch- and notebooks; we sparked suspicion but more importantly curiosity. Our attempts at explanation almost always opened wider conversations, and our approach through sound and illustration was perceived as less intrusive than photo or video cameras. Letting our interlocutors test the microphones and recording devices; or inviting them to watch as Melanie produced her sketches with impressive speed; rapidly transformed skepticism into appreciation. Especially Melanie’s drawings signaled an act of appreciation – of street vendors’ artistic setup, or of a particular migrant business – that was met with surprise, laughter and, eventually, pride. One of the highlights was thus the last day in Al-Hassan, when we handed out color prints of Melanie’s drawings and showed the first animated sound clips to our interlocutors.

Combining our diverse methods and ways of seeing and recording the Al-Hassan industrial zone taught us to think across media: to draw with sound, listen with maps, and write with sketches. This resulted in a final work that is more immersive and multi-layered than any of us could have achieved individually. The integration of sketches, field recordings, spatial mapping and text created a layered experience that mirrors the dense atmospheres of the industrial zone. One striking example is the illustrated sound clip we produced in a money transfer office, just after pay day when hundreds of migrant workers queued to send money back home. The combination of animated drawing and recorded sound captures the intensity of global connection –  through voices in different languages on video calls, or the waves of transnational cash transfers –  in a way that no written description could. 

J: Who do you hope will use and interact with this map, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

KG: The map was designed with a broad audience in mind – students, journalists, policymakers, researchers, and anyone interested in understanding what daily life looks and sounds like inside a global clothing production site. By centering the experiences of the predominantly female migrant workers who staff the production lines in Jordan’s factories, it brings into focus –  and into earshot –  the everyday realities of the roughly 55,000 migrant workers employed in Jordan’s garment industry. Because most live and work within the confines of secluded industrial zones, without time nor money to venture beyond dormitories and factories, they usually remain invisible to the wider Jordanian public.

Our aim was to move away from the conventions of academic writing by adopting a multisensory approach –  shifting from explanation to experience, from analysing an exploitative labour system to evoking its atmosphere through sound and image. The intention, however, is not to aestheticise or romanticise the harsh living and working conditions in Jordan’s industrial zones. At the same time, we wanted to avoid reproducing sweeping narratives about structural exploitation that risk flattening the nuances of how these labour systems function in practice; or how they shape workers’ day-to-day lives. Fully aware of the ethical challenges of representation, the project foregrounds workers’ everyday coping strategies and their capacity to create livelihoods and temporary forms of settlement. It does so by attending to the distinctive soundscapes through which migrant workers claim and transform space – often in ways that transgress the boundaries of the industrial zone and the formal wage-labour regime.

Beyond those specifically interested in Jordan, the map invites listeners to reflect on the harsh realities concealed beneath the smooth surface of the clothes we wear. It draws audiences into an extra-territorial enclave that sustains cheap production for global brands through the systematic exploitation of racialized and gendered difference. It opens space for feeling and imagining what it means to migrate for industrial work as a woman, and to have one’s life absorbed by a hyper-intensive production regime. The all-encompassing control over migrant workers’ lives—through spatial confinement and relentless time pressure—becomes both visible and audible, revealing the immense barriers to collective organizing or effective claim-making. 

J: What pedagogical opportunities do you see emerging from these visual and audible representations?

KG: The sound map opens up wide pedagogical and sensory possibilities. In classrooms, it allows students to move beyond abstract accounts of globalization and industrial labour to listen to how economic systems reconfigure territory and shape everyday life. Through sound, the export-processing zone becomes a space to be experienced rather than merely studied – its rhythm, density, and cosmopolitan atmosphere foregrounding the human dimension of global production.

This shift from neutral observation to immersion invites slower, more attentive engagement. Audiences hear migrant workers’ lives in ways that unsettle stereotypes and challenge portrayals that reduce them to anonymous figures. The project thus offers both a window onto the realities of migrant labour and a method for teaching the politics of global capitalism – particularly the gendered and racialized hierarchies it sustains – through alternative means.

Accessible online and designed for flexible navigation across devices, the map can be explored individually, each sound clip forming a self-contained story. It can also be used collectively – in classrooms, workshops, or public events – where sound becomes a shared experience and listening a social practice. We are preparing larger-scale formats for screenings and exhibitions, combining the sound map with sketches and images to immerse audiences in the sensory environment of the industrial zone.

In Jordan and beyond, the map serves as a pedagogical tool that engages audiences intellectually and sensorially, inviting them to learn, listen, and think differently about globalization, labour, and social injustice. Its reach extends further still: offering a model for communicating research differently and opening dialogues across geography, sound art, academia, and activism. 

Fig. 2 The ironing section in a subcontracting factory in Al-Hassan. Illustration by ©2025 Mélanie Forné

J: What other projects are you working on now?

KG: I am continuing my research on garment labor in Jordan, with a growing focus on the adverse health impacts of the production regime. In particular, I have begun examining how chronic respiratory conditions from textile dust develop over longer work and migration trajectories. Together with my colleague Alli Roshni, I am also exploring reproductive injustice as a form of labour control –  a grim feature of Jordan’s dormitory labour regime.

Alongside this, we are expanding our counter-mapping work of Jordan’s industrial zones through two forthcoming publications with 10 Tooba. The first is a brochure presenting a concrete planning and design proposal for a community centre for garment workers in the Ad-Dhulayl industrial zone – a project co-produced with local and foreign garment workers. The second is a larger publication bringing together our main findings from the counter-mapping research.

For the sound map, we are preparing to host a public screening in the Al-Hassan industrial zone and to present the project to a broader audience in Amman through an exhibition.