A cornucopia of waste at the Association of American Geographer’s Conference, April 2013

03/09/2013Max Liboiron

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, Environmental Quality, and Health Outcomes
4/10/2013, from 12:40 PM – 2:20 PM
Chair(s):
PC Lai – The University of Hong Kong

Patricia Polo – PUCE/Andina: Producing disease: Examining the relationship between the banana agribusiness and human health in Los Rios Province of Ecuador.
Ben Kreisman, PhD Student – University of Denver: Hydraulic Fracturing and Health Outcomes: A Statistical and Spatial Approach
Yongmei Lu – Texas State University – San Marcos: Individual-based Air Pollution Exposure Assessment
Yelena Ogneva-Himmelberger : Birth Weight Disparities in Massachusetts: Spatial Analysis of Associations with Socio-demographic Factors and Air Pollution
Benjamin Zhan et al: Visual Exploration of Geospatial Data to Identify Risk Factors of Birth Defects: Fetching a Trace of Bad Air in the Sky

Geographical Perspectives on Environmental Epigenetics: Transforming Ideas of Health and Environment
Wednesday, 4/10/2013, from 4:40 PM – 6:20 PM
Session Description: The emerging science of environmental epigenetics investigates how toxins and other environmental insults affect cellular environments in ways that re-direct phenotypical development without altering underlying DNA sequences. This science is altering basic ideas about health determinants, environmental influences, and even evolution. It therefore has the potential to revolutionize how people—scientists, health practitioners, policy makers, advocates, and citizens—think about the relationship between environments, bodies, and human health. This session will offer geographic perspectives on epigenetic knowledge and practice, and it will explore the implications of these discoveries for geographic knowledge in the nature-society and spatial traditions of human health.
Organizer(s):
Julie Guthman – Univ of California Santa Cruz
Becky Mansfield – The Ohio State University
Panelists:
Julie Guthman – Univ of California Santa Cruz : Geographical Implications of the New Environmental Epigenetics
J. Anthony Stallins – University of Kentucky : Bad parenting, personalized bacteria, and intestinal parasites: the biological embeddeness of scale
Christopher D Hartmann – The Ohio State University, Aaron Goldenberg – Case Western Reserve University, Patricia Marshall – Case Western Reserve University: Placing responsibility: lay understandings of gene-environment interaction and the causes of health disparities
Becky Mansfield – The Ohio State University: Abnormality, Race, and the New Epigenetic Biopolitics of Environmental Health
Discussant: Jake Kosek

Social, Cultural & Political Geographies of Waste
Thursday, 4/11/2013, from 8:00 AM – 9:40 AM
Session Description: Traditional understandings of waste as a technocratic problem embed waste in managerial discourses that often foreclose productive ways of thinking through waste in relation to myriad sociocultural, political, and economic processes. It is when waste escapes management, both in the material and symbolic sense, that Hawkins and Muecke suggest, “it acquires a crucial role in reorganizing social values” (x). While waste has always escaped such flows, recent ruptures in waste management from Occupy Wall Street in New York City (Liboiron) to the Egyptian Revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square (Winegar) have highlighted the ways in which waste is intimately entwined with politics. Scholarly works have also pushed us towards more critical studies of waste in terms of understanding the relationship between colonialism and capitalism (Gidwani) and the symbolic meaning of waste in knowledge production and intellectual history (Scanlan). More recently in surveying new geographies of waste, Moore has suggested that it is fruitful to think about waste in terms of Zizek’s Parallax Object, which means understanding waste as, “that which objects, that which disturbs the smooth running of things” (Zizek 17).

Organizers:
Mohammed Arefin – University of Arizona
Sarah A Moore – University of Wisconsin – Madison

Rachel Russell – University of Southern California: Transborder Flows of Untreated Wastewater: Comparing Media Discourse in Tijuana and San Diego from 2007-2011
Mike Dimpfl – UNC Chapel Hill: Cleanliness is next to _______________: Composting toilets, domestic boundaries, and daily habit
Pierre Desvaux – University of Grenoble 2: Legitimating informal waste practices: implementing norms and the right to the city
Sya Buryn Kedzior, PhD – Towson University: Making Waste and a Politics of Blame: Water Quality Testing and the Socio-Scientific Production of Pollution
Mohammed Rafi Arefin – University of Arizona: Clean Nation: The Politics of Waste Management in Cairo, Egypt

Social, Cultural & Political Geographies of Waste II
Thursday, 4/11/2013, from 10:00 AM – 11:40 AM
Parvathy Binoy – Syracuse University: Exploring landscapes of waste, gendered dispossession and resistance(s)
Alex V Barnard – University of California, Berkeley: Capitalist Waste Regimes and Social Movements: Theorizing Waste as a Political Resource and Mobilizing Frame
Zoltán Glück – CUNY Graduate Center: Political Subjectivity and the dialectic of Waste and Value: Reflections from Occupy Wall Street
Mark S. Jackson – University of Bristol: Re-Naturalizing Geographies of Political Economy: Waste, Decay, and the Running of Things

Re-cycling, or The Afterlives of Processes, Policies and Artifacts Past (VOLUME ONE)
Session Description: 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.

Organizer(s):
Jordan Howell – Michigan State University
Kerri Jean Ormerod – University of Arizona

Kerri Jean Ormerod – University of Arizona: Sewage as source water: The politics of engineering effluent for drinking water supply
Jordan Howell – Michigan State University: Partial Solutions at Best: Recycling on Maui, 1970-2012
Padma Chirumamilla – University of Michigan: Things falling apart: obsolete electronic technology, reuse and everyday life in South Asia
Virginia W Maclaren – UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO: Recycling Gone Wrong: How Undesirable Materials End Up in the Recycling Stream

Geographies of Garbage: the State of the Art on Discard Studies.
Thursday, 4/11/2013, from 4:40 PM – 6:20 PM
Session Description: We are all very familiar with it, we all partake in its production, management and disposal, and yet we often struggle to appreciate the extent of its societal impact. Rubbish is one of the most pervasive and more commonly disregarded elements shaping our contemporary society. Garbage has for long remained largely ‘black-boxed’ out of everyone’s sight, silently flowing in and out of our households, neighbourhoods, cities and countries. Against this dissociation, several scholars have, as O’Brien (2008) put it, sought to “recuperate waste from the intellectual dustbin to which it is all too readily consigned in social thought.”
In the past few years there has been both a resurgence of a multiplicity of approaches to studying waste geographically as well as a progressive interest in the potential of waste to build inter-disciplinary bridges of direct relevance to the key questions of our time. How can waste contribute to formalize and further multidisciplinary connections grounded in mundane problems? How can it help us with making sense of the intricate material and political geographies brought about by the urbanization and demographic trends that are refining global geographies? How can recent developments in these studies help us move beyond pre-political and linear views of ‘waste flows’ and the twin material/discursive mobility of garbage? Could waste chart stronger links between global processes and everyday materialities?
This panel seeks to investigate the state of the art in ‘discard studies’ and illustrate how the various debates on waste in social theory can contribute to generate critical knowledge on the connections and dissociation of human geography, physical world and international dynamics.

Introduction:
Michele Acuto – Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, University of Oxford
Panelists:
Max Liboiron – New York University
Sarah A Moore – University of Wisconsin – Madison
Gay Hawkins – Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
Simin Davoudi – newcastle University
Rosalind Fredericks – New York University
Mike Crang – Durham University

Re-cycling, or The Afterlives of Processes, Policies and Artifacts Past (VOLUME TWO)
Thursday, 4/11/2013, from 4:40 PM – 6:20 PM
Robert Kopack – Department of Geography Michigan State University: Refashioning the Soviet Techno-Industrial Landscape for a New Kazakh Future
Yeesheen Yang, Ph.D. – University of California, San Diego: The Afterlives of Organs: Bioethics, Organ Transfer Networks, and End-of-Life Processes
Adam Diamond – American University: Contingencies and Exigencies: How Ideology, Institutions and Geography Influence Organic Waste Recycling Policy in Germany and the United States
Discussant: Scott Kirsch – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Toxicity, Mining, and Genocide
Saturday, 4/13/2013, from 10:00 AM – 11:40 AM
Chair(s):
Jeren Guzmán
Panelists:
Elizabeth Sibilia, Ph.D Student – The Graduate Center, CUNY: BREAKING SHIPS IN BANGLADESH AND A SHADOWED HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT
Laura Pitkanen – University of Toronto: Failsafe: Uranium and the Politics of the Crown Corporation
Nathan Andrews : Digging for Survival or Justice? The Case of ‘Galamsey’ Workers in Aboso, Western Ghana
Jeren Guzmán: Who are the Big Actors in Global Environmental Degradation? Analyzing the Environmental Impact of the Military Industrial Complex.

Individual papers:

Shoes in the seaweed and bottles on the beach: women’s ‘things’ and conservation-as-development in coastal Yucatán Friday, 4/12/2013 as part of Feminist Political Ecology of Rivers, Watersheds, Wetlands and Coastal Environments 2

Using Risk Mapping and Q-Methodology to Understand Viewpoints Regarding Garbage in Coxcatlan, Puebla, Mexico. Wednesday, 4/10/2013 at 14:40 PM as part of Q Method in Human-Environment Research

Clean Nation: The Politics of Waste Management in Cairo, Egypt Thursday, 4/11/2013 at 10:00 AM as part of Writing Spaces of Exception: The Implications of Illegible Geographies

Ruin Spreads Over the Deep: Material Politics of the Production of Ocean Space Friday, 4/12/2013 at 10:00 AM as part of Case Studies of Environment, Health and Policy in Africa II

A comparison of solid waste infrastructure and reported cases of malaria among three communities in Accra, Ghana Friday, 4/12/2013 at 10:00 AM as part of Case Studies of Environment, Health and Policy in Africa II

Paradise Lost?: Conservation Politics in the Nuclear Wilderness Friday, 4/12/2013 at 8:00 AM as part of Hazards, Risks, and Disasters Specialty Group Session: Risk Perception and Hazards

The Utmost Ends of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: How Finns Perceive the Risks of Uranium Mining and Nuclear Waste Management Friday, 4/12/2013 at 8:00 AM as part of Hazards, Risks, and Disasters Specialty Group Session: Risk Perception and Hazards

Museum of Waste: A guided tour of the Anthropocene Era, featuring Chief Curator, Jayne S. Phace Friday, 4/12/2013 at 14:40 PM as part of Re-evaluating the Anthropocene, Resituating “Anthropos” 4: Representing the Anthropocene

Political Ecologies of Electronic Waste: Uncertainty and Legitimacy in the Governance of E-Waste Geographies Thursday, 4/11/2013 at 14:40 PM as part of Value Chains, Neoliberal Regulation, and Global Restructuring II

Deconstructing a mountain of ewaste: a mixed methods proposal for untangling the economies of electronic waste Saturday, 4/13/2013 at 10:00 AM as part of Unpacking ‘ethical’ markets II: Ethical markets in flux

A Vehicle Routing and Stop Locating Problem for Solid Waste Collection in Urban Areas Thursday, 4/11/2013 at 8:00 AM as part of Spatial Analysis

Urban excess and access: informal recycling as a livelihood strategy among rural-urban migrants in Shanghai Tuesday, 4/9/2013 at 10:00 AM as part of Sustainability: Applications and Theory

Environmental Justice and the Decision-Making Processes of Siting Toronto’s Solid Waste Thursday, 4/11/2013 at 14:40 PM as part of Human-Environment Geographies

Recycling Gone Wrong: How Undesirable Materials End Up in the Recycling Stream Thursday, 4/11/2013 at 10:00 AM as part of Spatial Analysis and Environmental Change and Resource Management

Southern California Water Resources. Applications of synthetic aperture radar for water quality management in the Southern California Bight Thursday, 4/11/2013 at 10:00 AM as part of Spatial Analysis and Environmental Change and Resource Management

Accumulation by dispossession and the contested enclosure of waste – struggles over the production of knowledge, meanings and identities at a Johannesburg garbage dump Wednesday, 4/10/2013 at 14:40 PM as part of Urban Political Ecology Redux III

Contaminants in the Green Waste Stream in Fresno, California Wednesday, 4/10/2013 at 14:40 PM as part of Young Leaders Mapping Sustainable Development Challenges: My Community, Our Earth Beyond Rio+20

The Second Life of Mobile Phones Tuesday, 4/9/2013 at 10:00 AM as part of Geography and Mobile Phone Data: from theory to empirics

Urban Food Metabolisms: Linking Urbanization, Food Consumption, and Food Waste Generation in East Asia Saturday, 4/13/2013 at 14:00 PM as part of Metabolizing Nature: The Space-time Dimensions of Commodity Production I

Wasted life, difference and the politics of value Tuesday, 4/9/2013 at 14:40 PM as part of Political Ecologies of Resource Extraction and Indigeneity in the Americas – Paper Session 2

Dis/Functional Fragmentation: The Unruliness of Boston’s Solid Waste Management System Thursday, 4/11/2013 at 10:00 AM as part of Urban and Regional Planning: Geographic Perspectives

Towards the ideal city – ideas and models in colonial wastewater planning and their adaptation to Hanoi Thursday, 4/11/2013 at 16:40 PM as part of Reworking Urban Nature: Tensions and Synergies in the Greening of Cities II

Geographies of wastewater: A comparative analysis of urban sanitation governance in the Mexican municipalities of Aguascalientes (Aguascalientes) and Leon (Guanajuato) Thursday, 4/11/2013 at 16:40 PM as part of Cities and Urban Regions in Latin America II

Flood Control and Flood Creation in Los Angeles: waterflow and storm drainage infrastructure in the Ballona Creek watershed Friday, 4/12/2013 at 16:40 PM as part of Watery Landscapes: Human Environmental Interactions in Rivers & Swamps

Downscaling Environmental Justice Analysis: Household-Level Disparities in Cancer Risks from Air Toxics Saturday, 4/13/2013 at 8:00 AM as part of Environmental Justice Research: Contemporary Issues and Emerging Topics I

Hazardous Air Pollutants and Flooding: A comparative interurban study of environmental injustice Saturday, 4/13/2013 at 8:00 AM as part of Environmental Justice Research: Contemporary Issues and Emerging Topics I

Immigrant Communities and Environmental Justice: A Comparative Study of Residential Mobility and Exposure to Air Toxics Saturday, 4/13/2013 at 8:00 AM as part of Environmental Justice Research: Contemporary Issues and Emerging Topics I

Nonpoint Source Pollution Loads in North Biscayne Bay, Florida Tuesday, 4/9/2013 at 14:40 PM as part of Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques in Wetland and Coastal Ecosystems (2)

Measuring the Impact of Stationary and Mobile Pollution Sources on Asthma Patient Outcomes in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina Thursday, 4/11/2013 at 8:00 AM as part of Spatial Analysis

Delineation of TCE Contamination Zones and Profiles of Social Vulnerability in a Blue-Collar Community Wednesday, 4/10/2013 at 10:00 AM as part of Environmental and Spatial Justice

Who breathes the good air? Social media and the debate over air pollution in Chinese cities Friday, 4/12/2013 at 8:00 AM as part of Geographical Perspectives of Environmental Politics I

Health Risk Assessment of TRI Toxic Air Pollutants in Texas from 1996 to 2008 Friday, 4/12/2013 at 10:00 AM as part of Health

Location, Land Use, and Air Pollution in U.S. Metropolitan Areas Saturday, 4/13/2013 at 16:00 PM as part of Cities and Environmental Change

Dark Skies: Light Pollution, Urban Entrepreneurialism, and Sustainability Planning in the American West Thursday, 4/11/2013 at 12:40 PM as part of Sustainably Governing the City and the State

Farm to Plate: Addressing the Environmental Justice Implications of Chemical Body Burden Disparities Through Food Wednesday, 4/10/2013 at 8:00 AM as part of Connecting Food Justice and Environmental Justice

Contested Governmentalities of Chemical Management: NGO Stakeholder Enrolment, Subjectivity & Influence within a Neo-liberal Risk Governance Agenda Wednesday, 4/10/2013 at 16:40 PM as part of Sustainable Development, Pollution, and Environmental Ethics