This is a session CFP for the upcoming Assoc. of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, Calif. from April 9-13 2013. The deadline for registration is in about a week!

Re-cycling, or The Afterlives of Processes, Policies and Artifacts Past Organizers: Jordan Howell (Michigan State University) and Kerri Jean Ormerod (University of Arizona)

In this session we examine the concept of re-cycling. Why the hyphen? While some papers will discuss recycling in the literal sense (e.g., plastic, wastewater, etc.) we also explore the ways in which policies, practices, (material) artifacts, and ideas from the past continue to live on and circulate through contemporary life and landscape. We use the concept of recycling in the abstract to ask questions about the collection, modification, and eventual redistribution of these ‘things’ (in the Latourian sense). A key focus of the session is to better understand the ways in which recycling leads to not only the re-production of materials and landscapes – with attendant cultural, political, material, and envirotechnical impacts – but also the re-production of ideologies and power structures. At the same time, we must acknowledge that despite (or because of?) the continual re-circulation of these materials and ideas, much like old newsprint in the pulper or wastewater in the settling tank, the re-fashioned remnants are never quite the same as they were in their original form. We think there is much to be gleaned from putting literal and figurative notions of recycling in conversation, and to these ends we seek papers on the following topics and questions:

– technologies of recycling, literal and figurative
– modifications to material /ideology/landscape that result from
recycling
– the recycling of landscapes (e.g., nuclear or contaminated sites being
‘repackaged’)
– the social/cultural/ideological aspects of closed-loop systems
– the rediscovery of the past and its reintroduction to the present
– museums as sites of re-circulation
– the limits of recycling, an/or resistance to recycling
– recycled versus ‘virgin’ materials/concepts
– recycling policy/-ies

Authors interested in contributing to the session(s) should send their 250 word abstracts and conference PIN numbers to Jordan Howell (howell29 [at] msu [dot] edu) by October 23, 2012.