Discard Studies

“In the end, the biggest problem with green consumerism may be that it acts as a smokescreen, creating the impression that people are taking environmental issues seriously while allowing them to continue their lives as usual.” Lee and English 2011 While promoting the sales of building products for the construction industry, the greenproducts website features … Continue reading »

Guest post by Mathew Lippincott. Originally posted on Mediashift’s Idea Lab. Detritivores are creatures that consume decaying matter. Detritivore designs use abundant waste products to make scalable technology solutions. Unlike loftier concepts of zero-waste design such as Cradle to Cradle, Detritivore design accepts that the world is already loaded with discarded and broken technology. Detritivore designers need … Continue reading »

Around one hundred Cooper Union students are in the third day of occupying the office of their president. The protest comes after a vastly unpopular decision by their board of trustees, lead by school president Bharucha, to end their more than 100 year tradition of a tuition-free school. They are fighting against an accelerating trend of introducing financial barriers … Continue reading »

There’s an interesting call for projects looking for “the most innovative projects in which repairability plays a significant role in the world.” It is a call for the converse of discard and disposability. From the site: There is a growing demand for longer lasting objects, things that are no longer destined to die the first … Continue reading »

Since at least the publication of Silent Spring, scientists, policy-makers, and the general public has focused on pollution in the environment as the object of regulation and control, a source of fear and anxiety, and the subject of scientific testing. As technologies, analytical detection limits, and eco-populist, anti-toxic movements have developed over the decades, scrutiny … Continue reading »

Via Reid Lifset, editor of Journal of Industrial Ecology (JIE): Over the past two decades governments around the world have been experimenting with a new strategy for managing waste.  By making producers responsible for their products when they become wastes, policy makers seek to significantly increase the recycling­-and recyclability­-of computers, packaging, automobiles, and household hazardous … Continue reading »

Call for Papers: The Global South 7.2 (Spring 2014) Theme: “The Aesthetics of Dislocation” Guest Editor: Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra For this issue, the editors invite papers that explore the relationship between aesthetics and place: how does the relationship to place condition aesthetic practice, and how does a change of place alter that practice? We are particularly … Continue reading »

“When I got to get the stuff in the bucket, first I go down the far left edge of the pile, dump it in. Then I go down the far right side of the pile, dump it in. Then I go down the middle. So everything fits in the back of the truck, all even.” … Continue reading »

The Gallery of Lost Art  is an online exhibition via the Tate Modern that explores the materiality, nature, biography and archive of missing works of art.The website explains: Destroyed, stolen, rejected, erased, ephemeral. Some of the most significant artworks of the last 100 years have been lost, and can no longer be seen. Some artworks … Continue reading »

Workshop “Out of culture: Society through its wastes” Frédéric Joulian (EHESS), Agnès Jeanjean (Univ. de Nice) Centre Norbert Elias EHESS, Centre Vieille Charité, 2 rue de la Charité, Marseille salle de réunion 3rd floor If one considers the phenomenon of culture in all its acceptions, and indeed contradictions (a set of objects and practices versus … Continue reading »

A new article in Science, Technology and Human Values brings up an issue that has been at the forefront of waste studies for several centuries: the relationships between technology, trust, taboo, sewage, and potable water. Kerri Jean Ormerod and Christopher A. Scott‘s “Drinking Wastewater: Public Trust in Potable Reuse,” is a short, focused piece on … Continue reading »

Measurements are never mere faithful representations of nature, but have social and political origins and ramifications. In representational theory, measurement is ”the correlation of numbers with entities that are not numbers,” a process of transformation, translation, and even interpretation at the level of sampling and gathering data. What is selected for measurement and what is not, how measurements … Continue reading »

Lindsey Dillon, of the University of California, Berkeley, has just published “Race, Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard” in the latest Antipode. Abstract:This paper advances the concept of “waste formations” as a way of thinking together processes of race, space, and waste in brownfield redevelopment projects. Defined as … Continue reading »

PICKING UP On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City TUESDAY, APRIL 23 4:00 – 6:00 MANHATTAN 3 SANITATION GARAGE South Street Viaduct, Pier 36 (on the East River about half a mile north of the Manhattan Bridge; entrance is under the FDR Drive between Montgomery St and … Continue reading »

By Zoltán Glück Originally published in Tidal on March 13, 2013 In the days and weeks following Hurricane Sandy the inequalities at the heart of New York City could scarcely be missed.  While hundreds of thousands of public housing residents went without heat, hot water or electricity, Mayor Michael Bloomberg rushed to get the stock … Continue reading »

In this short video found on the Boston University website, Professor Zaman explains how he and his students use discards to save lives.  He is driven by a desire to connect knowledge to real-world solutions for those in developing countries. As part of a classroom project, engineering students at BU sought to improve conditions for … Continue reading »

Nearly a year ago, I posted about a lawsuit brought against the City of New York by the People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street for trashing thousands of books during the eviction of Zuccoti Park. The story resonated with a lot of people because the destruction of books is seen as a special type of waste in our society. … Continue reading »

AAA 2013, Volunteered Session Proposal Title: Beyond purity and pollution? Hygiene, cleanliness, and urban futures. Organizers: Anna Boermel (King’s College London), Jamie Furniss (University of Edinburgh) This panel asks what role notions of hygiene, cleanliness and order have today in figurations and representations of urban futures, and the real and painful struggles of cities and … Continue reading »

Postgraduate Workshop & Conference: Media Archaeology and Technological Debris Thursday, June 20 – Friday, June 21, 2013, Goldsmiths, University of London This workshop aims to bring academics and PhD students together to discuss emerging research projects on the field of media studies. It means to combine the thriving approach of media archaeology with the growing … Continue reading »

Guest post by Kim DeWolff via her blog Plasticized. On a sunny spring morning we walk the Arahama coast near Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku region that experienced the March 2011 tsunami. Two years and a few days later, yellowed grass stands in cracked concrete outlines of houses, bathroom tiles still recognizable. A … Continue reading »

By Zoltana Domotor, from If I was a Hoarder: On December 1, 2012 the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association approved the final diagnostic criteria for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, due to be published in May 2013. Among the diagnoses new to the fifth edition of the manual … Continue reading »

Antipode, the Journal of Radical Geography, has recently published Jesse Goldstein’s Terra Economica: Waste and the Production of Enclosed Nature. Goldstein traces the historical flip of “wastelands” as common, open fields that were productive and essential to the well being of communities, to spaces seen as underutilized resources going to waste following the English enclosure … Continue reading »

CALL FOR PAPERS American Anthropological Association Meetings. Chicago, November 20-24, 2013. Ethnographies of Exposure: Rethinking the Body-Environment Relation A slew of contemporary phenomenon underscore emerging conceptions of the human condition as one of existential exposure to its surrounds: environmental toxicity, meteorological conditions, contaminated commodities, and global pandemics. These emerging conditions of exposure suggest a conception of a human body as … Continue reading »

One of the central tensions in discard studies is the othering and externalizing of  waste that originates in often intimate and everyday spaces and processes. This tension is maintained via material infrastructure (see, for example, Jennifer Clapp’s “The Distancing of Waste” or Coverly’s “Hidden Mountain“) and social), taboo (see Douglas’ Purity and Danger, or Inglis’ Dirt and Denigration), … Continue reading »

Once again, the AAG is rife with panels for the discard studies enthusiast. You can conceviably attend the entire week-long conference going to nothing but papers and panels on waste of one sort or another. Here is your guide to all things trashy at the conference in LA this April” Full Sessions: Producing Disease: Exposure, … Continue reading »

For all of us who work on pollution, toxics, and the afterlife of chemicals more broadly, there is a new, open listserv called Toxics in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It’s description: “This group is for academics and practitioners who study bodily and/or environmental toxins, pollution, and the lives of synthetic chemicals using methodologies in … Continue reading »

The Recycling of Building Materials in Late Antiquity: Practice and Ideology Saturday 9th March, 10.00-4.00 pm The Birley Room, D203, Department of Archaeology, Durham University, UK Schedule: 10.00 am Coffee I: 10.30-11.15 Managing Spolia: Legislation and Economy Legislation and Architectural Reuse in the Roman Empire (100 BC – AD 500) By Yuri Marano, yuri_marano@hotmail.com In … Continue reading »

Two calls for papers and one workshop are all due March 1, and they all have something in common: the indeterminacy of waste and pollution, and the struggle to make the effects determinant. The CFP for the Canadian Association of Geographers states: “It seems impossible to definitively ascertain, calculate, or identify waste once and for all or always and everywhere.”  The … Continue reading »

A Black and Decker toaster oven, a pre-amplifier (and its sister amplifier), an electric hot water boiler for tea, and a monitor from an older computer — these are just some of the electronics and small appliances that have moved from inside of my home to the staging area known as the garage, to the … Continue reading »

4S Conference October 9 – 12, 2013 San Diego, California Some of the challenges of twenty-first century pollutants are 1) their imperceptibility to dominant scientific formations, 2) their ability to do harm in trace quantities, 3) the subtle forms of intergenerational harm they can produce, and 4) the ubiquity of exposure throughout everyday spaces across … Continue reading »

4S Conference October 9 – 12, 2013 San Diego, California Exploring the question of how to make environmental health hazards perceptible, we invite participation in an interdisciplinary hands-on, half-day workshop on emerging methods for environmental monitoring in science and technology studies. In particular we highlight methods that engage with critical making through art, design, and … Continue reading »

While only one or two panels at Boston’s American and New England Studies Conference on March 23rd are explicitly about waste or ruination, I’m posting it because I think discard studies could use a push beyond the oft-used frames of production and consumption. Many of us are doing such work, including the complication of “production” … Continue reading »

An international group of scientists, including the young Chelsea Rochman and Mark Anthony Browne from California, with the support of the veteran marine scientist Richard Thompson from the UK and a host of others from the USA and Japan, has called on policy-makers to classify plastic waste as hazardous waste. Their argument, published in the latest issue of Nature, states that … Continue reading »

Hosna J. Shewly‘s “Abandoned spaces and bare life in the enclaves of the India–Bangladesh border” in the January edition of Political Geography looks at spaces abandoned by the state, but still subject to other state powers, and their production of “bare life,” Giorgio Agamben’s term for what happens when state power strips a person down … Continue reading »

Donna Houston’s “Environmental Justice Storytelling: Angels and Isotopes at Yucca Mountain, Nevada” in this issue of Antipode (March 2013), touches on the difficulties and triumphs of rendering often invisible, massive, or otherwise difficult to fathom forms of twenty-first century waste manifest via storytelling. While there is considerable ongoing research in scientific and health circles in … Continue reading »

As Samantha MacBride notes, modern waste–that is, postindustrial waste and particularly waste developed after 1945 when consumerism came into full swing in the United States– is synthetic, unpredictable, and heterogenous. Additionally, it has unique spatial and temporal characteristics compared to its predecessors. First, longevity: I’ve written elsewhere about the staggering longevity of plastics; the thousand to … Continue reading »

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers released their report on Global Food trends in anticipation of massive human population growth in the next 50 years. The trend that mattered most was the acute waste of nearly half the global food supply: Today, we produce about four billion metric tonnes of food per annum. Yet due to … Continue reading »

Reblogged from our friends at the fantastic Material World Blog. Aliine Lotman (Anthro Dept, EHI, Tallinn University) “Until the 19th century, the term ‘to consume’ was used mainly in its negative connotations of  ‘destruction’ and ‘waste’.  Tuberculosis was known as ‘consumption’, that is, a wasting disease.  Then  economists came up with a bizarre theory, which … Continue reading »

Royal Geographical Society/ Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference 2013 London August 28-30, 2013 Organiser: Deljana Iossifova, University of Manchester This session aims to bring together research related to one of the most perturbing issues for growing and developing cities of the Global South and their existing and future residents: attitudes toward excretion. Excretion-related … Continue reading »

Edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, has many entries on waste. Perhaps this is not surprising, since many of what Samantha MacBride calls “modern wastes,” characterized by their synthetic nature, unpredictability, and heterogeneity, are also permanent. From plastics to e-waste, industrially-generated waste now lasts in geological time rather than evolutionary … Continue reading »

Many thanks to Caitlin DeSilvey at the University of Exeter in the UK for submitting her syllabus “Wastelands.” Wastelands is an upper level course taught via the geography department. The course, or module, description is as follows: “In this module, waste-making is approached as a dynamic cultural phenomenon that works to stabilize (and destabilize) social, spatial, … Continue reading »

Call for Papers: Canadian Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, August 11-15, 2013 Special Session: Waste and indeterminacy Waste foments a lively conversation in geography, the social sciences, engineering, and the humanities. Specific topics proliferate – plastic bags and bottles, ocean waste, shipbreaking, e-waste, (in)formal economization, household recycling, landfilling, and sewage to name only a few – but a recurrent theme in what … Continue reading »

Many of our readers are interested in the relationships between waste and space. This is for you: Landscape Across the Disciplines: A Symposium April 5-6, 2013 Sponsored by SUNY Conversations in the Disciplines Teri Rueb and David Mark, Symposium co-Chairs This two-day SUNY ‘Conversation’ on Landscape Across the Disciplines provides a platform for inter- and … Continue reading »

While we often post article alerts about new scholarship on garbage matters, I wanted to take a moment to re-visit Ellen Handy’s 1995 essay, “Dust Piles and Damp Pavements: Excrement, Repression, and the Victorian City in Photography and Literature.”  First of all, thank you Ellen Handy for introducing readers to Thomas Annan’s enduring work (see “Dust … Continue reading »

Antipode has published Tom Perreault’s “Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining, Water and the Nature of Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano.” The article is noteworthy not only because it discusses some of the objects of discard studies–namely, pollution– but also because it figures industrial discards as a form of accumulation. The accumulation in question is capitalistic primitive accumulation … Continue reading »

This is Dutch photographer Bas Princen’s staggering panorama of the Zabaleen settlement in Cairo, Egypt’s capital.  These residents, living in an area known as garbage city, store, sort and recycle trash to earn their living.  The photograph was included in the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and an exhibition at Storefront Art and Architecture in New … Continue reading »

One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Waste is inherently ambivalent. It is both worthless and the basis for a billion dollar, recession-proof industry, complete with cartels and multinational companies. Disgust with filth both reaffirms our identities and troubles us. But a plethora of contradictory terms and values is not what makes trash wicked. Waste … Continue reading »

RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency) is a young yet accomplished project located within a construction waste recycling center in Philadelphia. They have twelve hours left in a fundraising campaign to open the trash-stream residency program to applications from artists in the Spring of 2013.  They hope to hire staff with the money and become a … Continue reading »

*Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia* Angela Mitropoulos Review from H-net: Contract and Contagion presents a theoretical approach for understanding the complex shifts of post-Fordism and neoliberalism by way of a critical reading of contracts, and through an exploration of the shifting politics of the household. It focuses on the salient question of capitalist futurity in order … Continue reading »

Progress in Human Geography just published Sarah A. Moore’s “Garbage Matters: Concepts in new geographies of waste.” An excerpt: “In order to demonstrate the myriad ways that waste disturbs, I therefore abstract the concepts from their roles as lenses in particular subfields, and focus instead on how each concept relates to two questions: how is waste defined (as a positivity or negativity) … Continue reading »