Discard studies is an emerging 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. Here is The Dirt for October 2018.

Recent Discard Studies Posts

• The what and the why of Discard Studies (Sept 1), by Max Liboiron & Josh Lepawsky
• Against Risk Perception: The Deficit Model and Public Understandings of Risk (Oct 1), by Alex Zahara

Publications (articles & books)

• Alley, K., Barr, J., & T. Mehta. (2018) Infrastructure disarray in the clean Ganga and clean India campaigns. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water. DOI: 10.1002/wat2.1310
• Ammon, F. R. (2016). Bulldozer: Demolition and clearance of the postwar landscape. Yale University Press.
• Circular CoLab. (2018). The State of the Circular Economy in America. Report.
• Cross, J., & Murray, D. (2018). The afterlives of solar power: Waste and repair off the grid in Kenya. Energy Research & Social Science, 44, 100-109.
• Darwish, S. (2018). Balad el-Ziblé (Country of Rubbish): Moral geographies of waste in post-revolutionary Tunisia. Anthropological Forum, 28, 61-73.
• Darwish, S. (2017) Of waste and revolutions: Environmental legacies of authoritarianism in Tunisia. in Global Africa: Into the Twenty First Century. University of California Press, (p. 308-217).
• Dillon, L. (2018). Crossroads in San Francisco: The Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory and its afterlives. in Inevitably Toxic: Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise. University of Pittsburgh Press. (p. 74-96).
• Dillon, L & J. Sze. (2018).  Equality in the air we breathe: Police violence, pollution, and the politics of sustainability. In Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power. NYU Press. (p. 246-270).
• Fu, J.-C., (2018). The tyranny of the bottle: Vitasoy and the cultural politics of packaging. Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 1 (4), 1-11.
• GAIA, Zero Waste Europe. (2018). Recycling is not enough: It’s time to rethink how to solve the plastic waste crisis. Report.
• Giles, D. B. (2018). Abject economies, illiberal embodiment, and the politics of waste. in Relational Poverty Politics: Forms, Struggles and Possibilities. University of Georgia Press. (p.113-130).
• Gorgolewski, M. (2017). Resource Salvation: The Architecture of Reuse. John Wiley & Sons.
• Hoag, C., Bertoni, F., & N. Busbandt. (2018) Wasteland ecologies: Undomestication and multispecies gains on an Anthropocene dumping ground. Journal of Ethnobiology, 38, 88-104.
• Katz, C. (2017). The Angel of Geography: Superman, Tiger Mother, aspiration management, and the child as waste. Progress in Human Geography, 0309132517708844.
• Kinchy, A., & Schaffer, G. (2018). Disclosure conflicts: Crude oil trains, fracking chemicals, and the politics of transparency. Science, Technology, & Human Values, DOI: 10.1177/0162243918768024.
• Larsen, F. (2018). Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store. Business History, DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2017.1418330
• Lipman, C. (2018). Living with the past at home: The afterlife of inherited domestic objects. Journal of Material Culture. DOI: 10.1177/1359183518801383
• Makov, T., Fishman, T., Chertow, M. R. and Blass, V. (2018), What affects the secondhand value of smartphones: Evidence from eBay. Journal of Industrial Ecology. . doi:10.1111/jiec.12806
• Matten, M. (2018). Coping with invisible threats: Nuclear radiation and science dissemination in Maoist China. East Asian Science, Technology, and Society, 12: 235-256.
• Mavhunga, C. (2018). The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production. MIT Press.
• Mayer, A., Haas, W., Wiedenhofer, D., Krausmann, F., Nuss, P. and Blengini, G. A. (2018), Measuring progress towards a circular economy: A monitoring framework for economy‐wide material loop closing in the EU28. Journal of Industrial Ecology. doi:10.1111/jiec.12809
• McFann, H. and A.L. Hinton. (2018). Impassable visions: The Cambodia to come, the detritus in its wake. In A Companion to the Anthropology of Death. Wiley-Blackwell. (p. 223–235).
• Millington, N. and M. Lawhon. (2018). Geographies of waste: Conceptual vectors from the Global South. Progress in Human Geography. DOI: 10.1177/0309132518799911.
• Neimanis, A. (2018). Queer times and chemical weapons, suspended in the Gotland Deep. Journal of Contemporary Archeology, 5: 66-78.
• Pfeffer, N. (2017). Insider Trading: How Mortuaries, Medicine and Money Have Built a Global Market in Human Cadaver Parts. Yale University Press.
• Powell, J. T. and Chertow, M. R. (2018), Quantity, components, and value of waste materials landfilled in the United States. Journal of Industrial Ecology. . doi:10.1111/jiec.12752
• Przybylo, E., & Rodrigues, S. (2018). Introduction: On the Politics of Ugliness. In On the Politics of Ugliness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. (pp. 1-30).
• Touhouliotis, V. (2018). Weak seed and a poisoned land: Slow violence and the toxic infrastructures of war in South Lebanon. Environmental Humanities, 10, 86-106.
• Tousignant, N. (2018). Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal. Duke University Press.
• Wake, N. (2018). Atomic bomb survivors, medical experts, and the endlessness of radiation illness. in Inevitably Toxic: Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise. University of Pittsburgh Press. (p. 235-258).
• Zahara, A. (2018) On sovereignty, deficits and dump fires: Risk governance in an Arctic ‘Dumpcano’. in Inevitably Toxic: Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise. University of Pittsburgh Press. (p. 259-283).

Dissertations & Theses

• Beckett, C. (2017). Rethinking remediation: Mine closure and community engagement at the Giant Mine, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada (MA Thesis). Department of Geography, Memorial University.
• Massaro, S. (2017). Strategie urbane integrate per affrontare la crisi dei rifiuti urbani. Nuove opportunità per un’architettura civica. (PhD Dissertation). Architecture Theories and Design, Sapienza University of Rome

Special Issues & Collections

• Engaging the Underground: An STS Field in Formation (2018). Engaging Science, Technology and Society. Edited by A. Kinchy, R. Phadke, & J. Smith.
• Feral Dynamics of Post-Industrial Ruin (2018). Journal of Ethnobiology. Edited by N. Busbandt and A. Tsing.
• Inevitably Toxic: Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise (2018). University of Pittsburgh Press. Edited by B. Sarathy, V. Hamilton, & J. Brodie.
• Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond. (2017). Somatosphere. Edited by P. Gupta & G. Hecht.

Calls for Proposals

• Call for applications: residency in construction and demolition waste recycling center: RAIR’s residency program provides artists on-site access to recovered materials and a studio space to produce work
• Call for papers: 16th Dangerous Consumptions Colloquium at Monash University, Melbourne, AU, Deadline October 17, 2018

• Towards A Sustainable Future: Cross-Cultural Strategies, Practices and Advancements, edited volume, Deadline October 20, 2018

Book Reviews

• Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950 by Robert Stolz (review) by Yuuki Tomozawa
• Environmental Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader edited by Christopher Wells (review) by Brian Hamilton
• The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit by Brian James Leech (review) by Arn Keeling

Conferences and Events

• Heritage in Reverse: Material Values, Waste and Deconstruction, Oct. 26-27, 2018 at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. The symposium includes a walking tour of recent reuse examples in Ottawa that are charged with complex symbolism, and paper sessions that bring together established practitioners, current scholars and emerging policy-makers to discuss: What can be learned from deconstruction sites about materials reuse opportunities in heritage work? What does recent research tell us about possibilities of connecting heritage conservation with waste? Which policies can guide difficult conservation decisions in the context of demolition and salvage?

Positions and Opportunities

• • Open rank professor, Race and Environmental Justice, Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, University of Virginia
  • Associate Professor (tenure track) in Political Science, University of Jyväskylä, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy
  • Associate Professor, Urban/Economic Geography, University of Toronto
  • Asst Professors – Native American Environment, Health and Community Cluster Hire, University of Wisconsin – Madison

• • Professor in Economic Geography, Lund University, Department of Human Geography
  • Associate Professor in International Political Economy, Durham University, School of Government and International Affairs
  • Assistant Professor in United States Politics with Quantitative Methods, Durham University, School of Government and International Affairs
  • Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
  • Assistant Professor, International Environmental Planning, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
  • Assistant Professor, Political Ecology, Rutgers University
  • Associate/Full Professor of Public Management and Policy, Georgia State University
  • Tenure Track or Tenured Faculty Position(s) in Social Policy, Indiana University
  • Assistant Professor in American Politics, Political Science Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, College of Letters & Science – Social Sciences – Political Science

• Assistant Professor in Technologies of Globalization at Department of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, College of Letters & Science – Social Sciences – Global Studies
• University Academic Fellow in Urban Analytics, University of Leeds, School of Geography
• Postdoctoral researcher in Urban Economics/Economic Geography, University of Helsinki, Institute of Urban and Regional Studies
• Two Postdoctoral Researchers at the Centre for Global Challenges, Utrecht University, Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance

• S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Scholar, Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy – College of Natural Resources, University of California – Berkeley 

• Postdoctoral Position in Disaster Mental Health and Vulnerable Populations, Natural Hazards Center in the Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado Boulder

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.

Support Discard Studies by becoming a Patreon subscriber.
Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.