Discard studies is an emerging field that takes systems of waste and wasting as its topic of study, including but beyond conventional notions of trash and garbage. 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 September 2019.

Recent Discard Studies Posts

• No insides on the outsides by Josh Lepawsky
• Waste is not “Matter out of place by Max Liboiron
• PSA: Beware of Easy Narratives by Josh Lepawsky

Publications (articles & books)

Note: If an article is behind a paywall, email the author. They are almost always authorized by copyright to distribute their own work.

• Agostinho, Daniela, and Nanna Bonde Thylstrup. (2019). If Truth Was a Woman: Leaky Infrastructures and the Gender Politics of Truth-Telling Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organziation.
• Boudia, Soraya, Creager, Angela N., Frickel, Scott, Henry, Emmanuel, Jas, Nathalie, Reinhardt, Carsten, & Roberts, Jody. (2018). Residues: Rethinking Chemical Environments. Engaging Science, Technology, Society Vol 4.
• de Carvalho Vallin, Isabella; Lopes Francelino Gonçalves Dias, Sylmara. (2019). The Double Burden of Environmental Injustice in a Female Waste Pickers Cooperative in Brazil, Austrian Journal for Development Studies, XXXV(2-3): 116-144.
• DeLoughrey, Elizabeth (2019). Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press.
• Dickau, Joel. (2019). Bad to chew: a commentary on the taste of texture. Food, Culture & Society, 1-10.
• Doron, Assa & Jeffrey, Robin. (2018). Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India. Harvard University Press.
• Eitel, Kathrin. (2019). Matter in and out of Place: A Story About Wastefulness, Hybridity, and Flows of Plastic, Austrian Journal for Development Studies, XXXV(2-3): 166-196.
• Gambetta, Curt (2019). ‘Throwaway Houses: Garbage Housing and the politics of ownership.’ in Kjetil Fallan (ed) The Culture of Nature in the History of Design, New York, Routledge. p. 221-236.
• Gambetta, Curt (2019). Destruction With Care. Interwoven
• Giraud, Eva Haifa (2019). What comes after entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion. Duke University Press.
• Hafner, Robert & Zirkl, Frank. (2019). Waste De-marginalised? A Comparative Analysis of the Socio-Economic Effects of In_formal Recycling Activities. Argentina, Brazil and Germany Revisited, Austrian Journal for Development Studies, XXXV(2-3): 145-167.
• Hatch, Anthony Ryan, Sonya Sternlieb, and Julia Gordon. (2019). Sugar ecologies: their metabolic and racial effects. Food, Culture & Society: 1-13.
• Hobart, Hiʻilei Julia & Stephanie Maroney. (2019). On racial constitutions and digestive therapeutics. Food, Culture & Society: 1-19.
• Iyer, Ivan. (2019). The ‘Abolishing’ of Manual Scavenging: Negotiations with Caste and Occupation in Ahmedabad, Austrian Journal for Development Studies, XXXV(2-3): 95-115.
• Koumparou, Dimitra, Golfinopoulos, Spyros K., and Samios, Stelios A. (2019). Human Excrement: Engineering, Law, and Its Symbolic and Political Character. Fresenius Environmental Bulletin, 28(10), 7019-7029.
• Laser, Stefan; Schlitz, Nicolas. (2019). Facing Frictions: Waste and Globalised Inequalities, Austrian Journal for Development Studies, XXXV(2-3): 5-32.
• Liboiron, Max. (2019). Discard Studies: Doing Science Differently, Austrian Journal for Development Studies, XXXV(2-3): 197-216.
• Little, Peter. C. (2019). Bodies, toxins, and e-waste Labour interventions in Ghana: toward a toxic postcolonial corporality?. AIBR: Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 14(1), 51-71.
• Millington, Nate, & Lawhon, Mary. (2018). Geographies of waste: Conceptual vectors from the Global South. Progress in Human Geography, 0309132518799911.
• O’Neill, Jesse (2019). ‘Clean and disciplined: The garden city in Singapore’ in Kjetil Fallan (ed) The Culture of Nature in the History of Design, New York, Routledge.
• Reno, Joshua (2020). Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness. University of California Press.
• Schlitz, Nicolas. (2019). Recycling Economies and the Use-Value of Waste: Scrap Shops in Kolkata, India, Austrian Journal for Development Studies, XXXV(2-3): 60-94.
• Schulz, Yvan. (2019). Scrapping ‘Irregulars’: China’s Recycling Policies, Development Ethos and Peasants Turned Entrepreneurs, Austrian Journal for Development Studies, XXXV(2-3): 33-59.
• Shapiro, N., & Kirksey, E. (2017). Chemo-ethnography: An introduction. Cultural Anthropology, 32(4), 481-493.
• Yates, Michelle. (2019). Crisis in the era of the end of cheap food: capitalism, cannibalism, and racial anxieties in Soylent Green. Food, Culture & Society, 1-14.
• Zebracki, Martin, Brian Doucet, and Toha De Brant. “Beyond Picturesque Decay: Detroit and the Photographic Sites of Confrontation Between Media and Residents.” Space and Culture 22, no. 4: 489–508.

Dissertations & Theses

• Barr, Jen. (2019). Private Acts, Public Stories: Sanitation NGOs during the ‘Clean India’ Mission. Emory.

Special Issues & Collections

• Edible Feminisms: On Commodities, Wastes, and (Un)intended Consequences. Food, Culture, and Society 22(5). Edited by Sarah E. Tracy & Rachel Vaughn.
• Waste and globalized inequalities’ Austrian Journal for Development Studies, Volume XXXV, Issue 2/3. Edited by Schlitz, Nicolas; Laser, Stefan

Calls for Proposals

• ‘Unpacking Food and Drink,’ Worldwide Waste, invites submissions of papers that that deal with the cultural, economic, political, and social contexts that influence attitudes, practices, and policies related to food packaging.
• Call for Papers: Environmental Artistic Practices and Indigeneity: In(ter)ventions, Recycling, Sovereignty, eTropic. Deadline Oct 15.
• Environmental Justice in Multispecies Worlds: Land, Water, Food: An interdisciplinary graduate student conference hosted by the Center for Culture, History, and Environment, University of Wisconsin–Madison, March 6-8, 2020: multispeciesjustice.org

Book Reviews

• Laser, Stefan. (2019). Who Carries the Weight of Digital Technologies? What is its Weight Anyway? Review of Josh Lepawsky’s ‘Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste’, Austrian Journal for Development Studies, XXXV(2-3), 217-227.

Audio Visual

• ‘Orbital Waste: The Strange Afterlife Of Space Technology’, with Josh Reno

Positions and Opportunities

• Visiting Scholar Program, Deakin Science and Society Network (paid accommodation and stipend, 1-3 months), Deakin University.
• Tier 1 Canada Research Chair (CRC) – Geographies of Racialization and Environment. Simon Fraser University.
• Assistant Professor Appointment – Global Urbanism. Dartmouth College Dept. of Geography
• Assistant Professor – Sustainability Studies. Queen’s University.
• Associate or Full Professor, Indigenous Environmental Studies, Syracuse University
• Assistant Professor, Comparative Ethnic Studies-Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
• Assistant or Associate Professor in Science Studies, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU
• Assistant Professor in health, medicine, and public policy, Department of Sociology, Vassar College
• Academic Director, Sustainable Urban Environments major, Department of Technology, Culture, and Society, NYU Tandon School of Engineering
• Temporary Lecturers, Department of Global Studies, UC Santa Barbara
• Postdoc, coupled human-natural system modeling with emphasis on socioeconomic vulnerabilities, Earth Lab, CU Boulder
• Assistant/Associate Professors in Environment and Sustainability, SUNY at Buffalo

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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