Discard studies is an interdisciplinary field that takes waste and wasting as its topic of study. To keep practitioners up-to-date, Discard Studies publishes The Dirt, a monthly compilation of recent publications, positions, opportunities, and calls for proposals in the field. Since Discard Studies has been on a break, we have 6 months worth of Dirt to share this month!

Discard Studies Posts

• Relaunch post! The what and the why of Discard Studies
• Top post to date: Map of 40 most influential environmental justice conflicts in the US, by EJOLT

Publications (articles & books)

• Akese, G. & Little, P. (2018). Electronic Waste and the Environmental Justice Challenge in Agbogbloshie. Environmental Justice 11(2), 77-83.
• Altman, Rebecca. (2018). American Beauties. Topic (14).
• Andersen, A. O. (2018). Purification: Engineering Water and Producing Politics. Science, Technology, & Human Values 43(3), 379-400.
• Angelakis, A. N., Asano, T., Bahri, A., Jimenez, B., & Tchobanoglous, G. (2018). Water Reuse: From Ancient to Modern Times and the Future. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 6, 26.
• Arnold, David. (2013). Pollution, toxicity and public health in metropolitan India, 1850–1939. Journal of Historical Geography 42: 124-133.
• Ackerman, F. (2008). Poisoned for pennies: the economics of toxics and precaution. Island Press.
• Bentley, M. (2018). Immersive Ruin: Chernobyl and Virtual Decay. In Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay (pp. 181-200). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
• Bisschop, L., & Huisman, W. (2018). Waste crime from three criminological perspectives. Green Crimes and Dirty Money. Routledge.
• Butler, S. (2018). Repurposing cultural heritage collections: the aesthetics and meaning of reuse. In Subverting Consumerism (pp. 65-82). Routledge.
• Calvillo, N. (2018). Political airs: From monitoring to attuned sensing air pollution. Social studies of science, 48(3), 372-388.
• Civis, G. (2018). Rubbish and Regulations in the Middle Ages. Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation: Between Text and Practice, 61.
• Clancey, G. (2018). Hygiene in a Landlord State: Health, Cleanliness and Chewing Gum in Late Twentieth Century Singapore. Science, Technology and Society, 23(2), 214-233.
• Creager, A. N. (2018). Human bodies as chemical sensors: A history of biomonitoring for environmental health and regulation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A.
• Crocker, R., & Chiveralls, K. (Eds.). (2018). Subverting Consumerism: Reuse in an Accelerated World. Routledge.
• Daigle, M. (2018). “Resurging through Kishiichiwan: The spatial politics of Indigenous water relations.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 6(2): 159- 172.
• Davies, T. (2018). Toxic Space and Time: Slow Violence, Necropolitics, and Petrochemical Pollution. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1-17.
• Dodsworth, F., & Walford, A. (Eds.). (2018). A World Laid Waste?: Responding to the Social, Cultural and Political Consequences of Globalisation. Routledge.
• Ferri, B. A. (2018). Metaphors of Contagion and the Autoimmune Body. Feminist Formations, 30(1), 1-20.
• Fiske, A. (2018). Dirty hands: The toxic politics of denunciation. Social studies of science, 0306312718781505.
• Fritsch, K., & McGuire, A. (2018). The Biosocial Politics of Queer/Crip Contagions. Feminist Formations, 30(1), vii-xiv.
• Gibson, M. F. (2018). Subtle Neglect and Yuckiness: Queerness, Disability, and Contagion in Mother Narratives. Feminist Formations, 30(1), 117-140.
• Gille, Z., (2018). Of Fish Feces, Shamanic Bowls and Chimpanzee Scraps: Extension vs Precision in the Concept of Waste. Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. 1(1), p.2.
• Gregson, N., & Crang, M. (2018). Made in China and the new world of secondary resource recovery. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 0308518X18791175.
• Gupta, P. & G. Hecht (2017). Toxicity, Waste, Detritus: An Introduction. Somatosphere.
• Guzman, G., & De Souza, M. M. P. (2018). Shifting modes of governing municipal waste–A sociology of translation approach. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 50(4), 922-938.
• Hayman, E. (2018).“Future Rivers of the Anthropocene or Whose Anthropocene is it?: Decolonising the Anthropocene” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 6(2): 77-92.
• Hecht, G. (2018). Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence. Cultural Anthropology, 33(1), 109-141.
• Hodges, S. (2017). Hospitals as factories of medical garbage. Anthropology & medicine, 24(3), 319-333.
• Horton, J., & Kraftl, P. (2017). Rats, assorted shit and ‘racist groundwater’: Towards extra-sectional understandings of childhoods and social-material processes. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0263775817747278.
• Ialenti, V. (2018). Waste makes haste: How a campaign to speed up nuclear waste shipments shut down the WIPP long-term repository. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1-14.
• Kane, C. (2018). The Toxic Sublime: Landscape Photography and Data Visualization. Theory, Culture & Society, 35(3), 121-147.
• Liboiron, M., Tironi, M., & Calvillo, N. (2018). Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world. Social studies of science, 48(3), 331-349.
• Liboiron, M. (2018). Using art to research diverse economies: social experiments in re-valuing waste. In Subverting Consumerism (pp. 49-64). Routledge.
• Lepawsky, J. (2018). Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste. MIT Press.
• Loewen, K. (2018). Reproducing disposability: Unsettled labor strategies in the construction of e-commerce markets. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0263775818770453.
• Lyons, S., Ed. (2018). Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay. Palgrave Macmillan
• Lyons, S. (2018). Introduction: Ruin Porn, Capitalism, and the Anthropocene. In Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay(pp. 1-10). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
• Nieuwenhuis, M. (2018). Atmospheric governance: Gassing as law for the protection and killing of life. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(1), 78-95.
• Millar, K. (2018). Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump. Duke University Press.
• Moore, S. A., Rosenfeld, H., & Rafi Arefin, M. (2018). Generating anxiety, short-circuiting desire: Battery waste and the capitalist phantasy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0263775818777249.
• Murphy, M. (2017). Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations. Cultural Anthropology 32: 494-503.
• Nunn, N. (2018). Toxic Encounters, Settler Logics of Elimination, and the Future of a Continent. Antipode.
• O’Callaghan, C. (2018). Planetary urbanization in ruins: Provisional theory and Ireland’s crisis. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(3), 420-438.
• Pheasant-Kelly, F. (2009). Death and Derision in Cinematic Toilets. Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, 195.
• Phillips, Delores. B. (2012). ‘What do I have to do with all this?’ Eating, excreting, and belonging in Chris Abani’s GraceLand. Postcolonial Studies, 15(1), 105-125.
• Quark, A. (2018). Outsourcing Regulatory Decision-making: “International” Epistemic Communities, Transnational Firms, and Pesticide Residue Standards in India. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 0162243918779123.
• Reddy, R. N. (2018). The urban under erasure: Towards a postcolonial critique of planetary urbanization. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0263775817744220.
• Reno, J. (2018). What is Waste?. Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 1(1).
• Reno, J. O. (2018). Making Time with Amateur Astronomers and Orbital Space Debris: Attunement and the Matter of Temporality. JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ARCHAEOLOGY, 5(1), 4-18.
• Roberts, E. (2017). What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City. Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 592-619.
• Runyan, A. S. (2018). Disposable waste, lands and bodies under Canada’s gendered nuclear colonialism. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20(1), 24-38.
• Shapiro, N. and Kirksey, E. (2017). Chemoethnography: An Introduction. Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 481-493.
• Slater, J., Jones, C., & Procter, L. (2017). Troubling school toilets: resisting discourses of ‘development’through a critical disability studies and critical psychology lens. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 1-12.
• Simmons, K. (2017). Settler Atmospherics. Cultural Anthropology online.
• Spackman, C., & Burlingame, G. A. (2018). Sensory politics: The tug-of-war between potability and palatability in municipal water production. Social studies of science, 0306312718778358.
• Terreni Brown, S. (2014). Planning Kampala: histories of sanitary intervention and in/formal spaces. Critical African Studies, 6(1), 71-90.
• Tironi, M. (2018). Hypo-interventions: Intimate activism in toxic environments. Social studies of science, 48(3), 438-455.
• Ureta, S., & Flores, P. (2018). Don’t wake up the dragon! Monstrous geontologies in a mining waste impoundment. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0263775818780373.
• Wylie, S. A. (2018). Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds. Duke University Press.
• Yazzie, M., & Baldy, C. (2018). “Introduction: Indigenous peoples and the politics of water,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 6(2): 1-18.

Dissertations& Theses

• Adkins, S. (2017). From Disposable Culture to Disposable People: Teaching About the Unintended Consequences of Plastics. PhD diss., Antioch University.
• Atutxa, Ibai. (2018). Toxic Criminalities in Francoist Spain the Making of a European Dictatorship. PhD diss., Columbia University.
• Ferrero, A. E. (2018). Food Waste, Food Insecurity, and Food Donation Liability. University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects. http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/2216
• Lougheed, S. C. (2017). Disposing of Risk: The Biopolitics of Recalled Food and the (Un)Making of Waste. PhD diss., Queen’s University.
• Sicherman, M. (2018). “Forgotten by God”: How the People of Barren Island Built a Thriving Community on New York City’s Garbage. Thesis. Brooklyn College.
• Srigyan, P. (2016). Delhi’s Air: Histories, Technologies, and Futures. Thesis. Ambedkar University, Delhi.
• Terreni Brown, S. E. (2014). Kampala’s shitscape: exploring urbanity and sanitation in Uganda. Thesis, University of Edinburgh.
• Tietjen, J. M. (2016). “Unbearable Stench”: Excremental Violence in Holocaust Literature. Brandeis University.
• Tuçaltan, G. (2017). Metabolic Urbanization of Waste in Ankara: A Governance Perspective. Dissertation. Rotterdam: Eburon.

Special Issues

• The Biosocial Politics of Queer/Crip Contagions (2018). Feminist Formations 30(1). Guest Edited by Kelly Fritsch and Anne McGuire
• Toxic Politics (2018). Social Studies of Science 48(3). Guest Edited by Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi, Nerea Calvillo.
• Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water (2018). Decolonization 7(1). Edited by Cutcha Risling Baldy & Melanie K. Yazzie.

Book Reviews

• Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times by Alexis Shotwell (review) by  Sunaura Taylor
• Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare (review) by Julie Passanante Elman
• Gut Feminism by Elizabeth A. Wilson (review) by Rebekah Sheldon
• Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway (review) by David R. Anderson

New Journal

Detritus:  Multidisciplinary Journal for Waste Resources and Residues Detritus is a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal which publishes papers on waste resources, residue management and engineering, also with a focus on social needs and developments. Research articles, position and prospect papers, case studies, country reports, new technologies developments and full-scale applications, examples of “best practice”, policies and strategies and papers on lessons to be learned are welcomed.

Audio-visuals

WYNC’s Radiolab has a new episode out called Post No Evil. It’s an exploration of how Facebook attempts to systematize the difference between permitted and prohibited posts. It’s also a fantastic lesson in the significance of Mary Douglas’ famous adage that “where there is dirt, there is system”. This episode from Radiolab is a good demonstration of how Douglas’ formula works in both directions: not only does dirt signal system, but where there is system, inevitably there is dirt. “Post No Evil” is a good way of thinking about the differences between discard studies and waste studies. It’s also a nice demonstration of the idea that technology is society made durable.

Calls for Papers & Proposals

• CFP—Chemical Entanglements: Gender and Exposure, special issue of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Deadline December 17, 2018.
• CFP- Practices and materialisations of active ageing, SIEF2019 14th Congress: Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 14-17 April 2019

Conferences and Events

NatureCultures, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Lapland, Sápmi, Finland, November 22–23, 2018.  Ecological compensation, biodiversity offsetting, no net loss of biodiversity, ecosystem services, low-carbon economy, ecoinnovation, circular economy, zero waste, active energy citizenship, resilience and bioeconomy. These are examples of concepts that have in the past few years steered the conversations of the management of natural resources, environmental protection and environmental politics and greatly influenced political agendas. A growing awareness of the climate change, of the sixth wave of extinction and of other irreversible changes in our environment has influenced the emergence of re-conceptualizations of the eco-sociality of societies. It has sensitized subjects to identify the most critical question for the future policies and research: How to
comprehend the co-existence of nature and society.

Festival of Maintenance, September 22, London, UK. The Festival of Maintenance is a celebration of those who maintain different parts of our world, and how they do it, recognising the often hidden work done in repair, custodianship, stewardship, tending and caring for the things that matter. It will be a full day (10am – 5pm) of short talks and discussions with a diverse range of maintainers, custodians, community managers, repairers and stewards, and those who support them. Afterwards we’ll be adjourning to a local pub to continue the conversations.

Positions and Opportunities

• Assistant Professor – Science and Technology Studies, Institute for History & Philosophy of Science & Technology, University of Toronto
• Associate Professor / Professor – Urban Innovation, Political Science, University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) and the Institute of Management and Innovation (IMI)
• Associate Professor / Professor – Indigenous Politics, Political Science, University of Toronto
• Assistant Professor – Gender and Inequality, Sociology, University of Toronto
• Assistant Professor -Technology and Race – Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, University of Toronto Missessa
• Director – Interdisciplinary Centre for Health & Society, Interdisciplinary Centre for Health & Society, University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC)
• Assistant Professor-  History of Science/Medicine, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse
• Assistant Professor- Futures, Arizona State University
• Assistant or Associate Professor – Sociology of Science and/or Technology, Georgia Tech
• Assistant Professor, History of Science/Medicine, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse
• Assistant Professor – Latinx/Indigenous Sovereignty, Human Rights, Violence, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)
• Professor/Associate Professor, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
• Assistant Professor in Technologies of Globalization, UC Santa Barbara
• Open rank, Tenure-track position, Feminist Science and Technology Studies, San Diego State University
• Postdoc position – Marine forecasting & risk, Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland
• Postdoctoral Fellow in Law, Gender, and Health, University of Michigan
• Research Center Director and Associate/Full Professor in Environmental Health, University of Massachusetts Lowell
• Assistant Professor – Animal and Poultry Waste, NC State University
• Instructor -Water Management/Waste Water Treatment, Baltimore City Community College
• Environmental Compliance Specialist, San Jose State University
• Director, Environmental, Health & Safety, College of William & Mary
• Resident Lecturer in Environmental Policy & Socioeconomic Values, The School for Field Studies, Turks and Caicos (TC)
• Assistant Professor, Environmental Geosciences, University of Guelph
• Canada Research Chair Tier II in Post-TRC Artistic and/or Curatorial Practices, University of Regina
• SSHRC Canada Research Chair Tier II in Digital Humanities, Simon Fraser University

If you have an item to add to The Dirt, please contact editors@discardstudies.com. We are especially interested in non-English language submissions, and those from outside North America.

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