The Dirt
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 December 2019 and January 2020.
Recent Discard Studies Posts
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.
- Balayannis, Angeliki. (2020). Toxic sights: The spectacle of hazardous waste removal. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775819900197
- Barthe, Yannick., Elam, Mark., & Sundqvist, Göran. (2019). Technological Fix or Divisible Object of Collective Concern? Histories of Conflict over the Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste in Sweden and France. Science as Culture, 1-23.
- Behrsin, Ingrid & Salvatore Paolo De Rosa (2020). Contaminant, Commodity and Fuel: A Multi‐sited Study of Waste’s roles in Urban Transformations from Italy to Austria. International journal of urban and regional research. DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12880
- Borowy, Iris. Editorial Introduction to the Special Collection ‘Development of Waste – Development as Waste.’ Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 2, no. 1 (December 12, 2019): 12.
- Borowy, Iris. (2019). Hazardous Waste: The Beginning of International Organizations Addressing a Growing Global Challenge in the 1970s. Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2(1).
- Corwin, Julia. (2019) Between Toxics and Gold: Devaluing Informal Labor in the Global Urban Mine. Capitalism Nature Socialism.
- Engel-Di Mauro, Salvatore. (2019). The troubling and troublesome worlds of urban soil trace element contamination baselines. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2514848619896234.
- Feldman, Ilana. (2019). Elimination Politics: Punishment and Imprisonment in Palestine. Public Culture, 31(3), 563-580.
- Gifford, L. “You can’t value what you can’t measure”: a critical look at forest carbon accounting. (2020). Climatic Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02653-1
- Gray, J., Bounegru, L., & Venturini, T. (2020). ‘Fake news’ as infrastructural uncanny. New Media & Society, 22(2), 317–341.
- Lesley Henderson, Christopher Green. (2020). Making sense of microplastics? Public understandings of plastic pollution. Marine Pollution Bulletin, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2020.110908.
- Henry, Matthew S. (2019). Extractive Fictions and Postextraction Futurisms: Energy and Environmental Injustice in Appalachia. Environmental Humanities, 11(2), 402-426.
- Holmberg, Tora. (2019). Animal Waste Work. The Case of Urban Sewage Management in Sweden. Contemporary Social Science.
- Kenner, Alison., Mirzaei, Aftab., & Spackman, Christy. (2019). Breathing in the Anthropocene: Thinking through Scale with Containment Technologies. Cultural Studies Review, 25(2).
- Kréziak, D., Prim-Allaz, I., & Robinot, E. (2020). The destiny of replaced technological products: The influence of perceived residual value. Recherche et Applications En Marketing (English Edition). https://doi.org/10.1177/2051570719891037
- Krones, Jonathan Seth. (2019). The Emergence of a Food-Waste-Based Commodity Frontier in the United States. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1-15.
- Liebman, Adam and Goeun Lee. (2019). Garbage as value and sorting as labour in China’s new waste policy. Made in China Journal.
- Mayes, Christopher (2020). Governmentality of Fencing in Australia: Tracing the
White Wires from Paddocks to Aboriginal Protection, Pest Exclusion and Immigration Restriction. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 41, 42-59. - Merleau-Ponty, Noémie. (2019). A Hierarchy of Deaths: Stem Cells, Animals and Humans Understood by Developmental Biologists. Science as Culture, 1-21.
- Persaud, Donny, Lepawsky, Josh & Liboiron, Max. (2019). Viscous Objects: The Uneven Resistances of Repair. Techniques & Culture. Revue semestrielle d’anthropologie des techniques, (72), 126-129.
- Rathore, Gayatari Jai Singh. (2019). Circulating Waste, Circulating Bodies? A Critical Review of E-Waste Trade. Geoforum.
- Reno, Josh O. (2020). Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness. University of California Press.
- Reynolds, Christian, Tammara Soma, Charlotte Spring, and Jordon Lazell. (2020) Handbook of Food Waste. Routledge.
- Pitkanen, Laura. (2019).Tactics and strategies of containment: Preserving state power in Canadian uranium refining. The Extractive Industries and Society.
- Salsabil Shaikh, Keith Thomas, Segu Zuhair. (2020). An exploratory study of e-waste creation and disposal: Upstream considerations. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2019.104662.
- Samson, Melanie. (2019). Whose Frontier is it Anyway? Reclaimer “Integration” and the Battle Over Johannesburg’s Waste-based Commodity Frontier. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1-16.
- Schindler, Seth, and Federico Demaria. (2019). Garbage Is Gold’: Waste-Based Commodity Frontiers, Modes of Valorization and Ecological Distribution Conflicts.” Capitalism Nature Socialism.
- Senanayake, Nari. (2019). Tasting toxicity: bodies, perplexity, and the fraught witnessing of environmental risk in Sri Lanka’s dry zone. Gender, Place and Culture. 0(0) 1-25.
- Silver, Jonathan. (2019). Decaying infrastructures in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2514848619890513.
- Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia. (2019). Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine. Stanford University Press.
- Tuçaltan, Gül. (2019). Waste and Metropolitan Governance as Vehicles of Eviscerating Urbanism: A Case From Ankara. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1-15.
- Ureta, S. (2020). Ruination Science: Producing Knowledge from a Toxic World. Science, Technology, & Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243919900957
- Valk, Julie. (2020). The smell of Shōwa: Time, materiality and regimes of value in Japan’s second-hand kimono industry. Journal of Material Culture
- Vine, Michael. (2019). Beyond Touch: Cultivating Caring Atmospheres in Arid America. Journal for the Anthropology of North America, 22(1), 22-34.
- Ross, S. and Angel, V. (2019), Heritage and waste: introduction, Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, 10(1), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCHMSD-02-2020-116
- Webb Jr, James L. (2019). The Guts of the Matter: A Global History of Human Waste and Infectious Intestinal Disease. Cambridge University Press.
- Willems, Thijs., & Graham, Conner. (2019). The Imagination of Singapore’s Smart Nation as Digital Infrastructure: Rendering (Digital) Work Invisible. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 13(4), 511-536.
- Zurn, Perry. (2019). Waste Culture and Isolation: Prisons, Toilets, and Gender Segregation. Hypatia, 34(4), 668-689.
Special Issues and Collections
- An Elemental Anthropocene, Cultural Studies Review, 2019. Edited by Timothy Neale, Will Smith, and Alison Kenner.
- Development of Waste – Development as Waste (2019), Worldwide Waste. Edited by Iris Borowy.
- Special issue on landfill mining, Detritus Volume 08, December 2019
- Routledge Handbook of Food Waste (2019). Edited by Christian Reynolds, Tammara Soma, Charlotte Spring, Jordon Lazell.
- Violence and Policing. (2019). Public Culture. Edited by Shamus Khan & Madiha Tahir
Dissertations/Theses
- Köksal, Esra. (2020). The artistic afterlife of electronic waste. Master’s thesis, Bilkent University.
- Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia. (2015). Waste and the Phantom State: The Emergence of the Environment in Post-Oslo Palestine. PhD Dissertation, Columbia University.
Book Reviews
- Life without Lead: Contamination, Crisis and Hope in Uruguay by Daniel Renfrew Book review forum with Josiah Rector, Elizabeth F. S. Roberts, Javier Auyero, Mariana Achugar, & Daniel Renfrew. Somatosphere.
- Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste by Josh Lepawsky Review forum with Alex Zahara, Kate Parizeau, Raul Pacheco-Vega, Micheal Hennessey Picard, Rajyashree N. Reddy, & Josh Lepawsky. Canadian Geographer.
Calls for Proposals & Participation
- Computing Within Limits 2020
- Mining the Connections, call for conference participants, 2-5 November, Montreal, Canada. Deadline for abstracts: 31 March 2020.
- On methods of thing-following, call of for papers, 1-4 September 2020, RGS Annual Conference, London, UK. Deadline: 5 February 2020.
- Workshop: Timescapes of Mining, Freiberg (Saxony), Germany. August 16-17, 2020. Application deadline: February 29, 2020
Open panels at Social Studies of Science (4S) Conference, 18-21 August 2020, Prague. Deadline for abstracts: 28 February 2020. See panel descriptions.
- Acknowledging residues: the (un)-making of an environmental concern
- Approaching the Digital Anthropocene
- Articulating and Relating to Different Forms of the Good in Bad Situations
- Be(com)ing industrial: objects, scales, and power dynamics at play
- Citing the South: Infometrics and Open Science for Sustainable Development in the Global South
- Commodifying environmental data: markets, materiality, knowledge
- Death Itself: Technology, Ethics, and Ambiguity
- Decentring datacentres: their politics, energy, waste and epistemics
- Digital pollutions: resource consumption, waste and environmental problems in information societies
- Disciplining the senses
- Disgust
- Doing STS amid the Procession of Disaster
- Dying at the Margins: Emerging Material-Discursive Perspectives on Death and Dying
- Engineering Extinction: Prospects, Uncertainties, and Responsibilities in Planned Extinction
- Extractivism Revisited: STS Perspectives
- Fossil Legacies – Re-Assembling Work, Gender and Technology in the Coal Phase Out
- Grotesque Epistemologies
- Growing old in a more-than human world: Materialities of care and interspecies entanglements
- Hormonal paradoxes: circulations, access, exposures
- Histories And Ecologies of Therapeutic Places
- Infrastructures of Care: Disability, Autonomy, Inter/Dependencies
- Maintenance and its knowledges
- Materiality, Knowledges, Inequalities: Multiplicity and Sovereignty in a Post_Colonial World
- Making chemical kin
- More-than-Human Ethnographies of Global Health
- Mutagenic Legacies and Future Living
- Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and Animals See and Make Sense
- ‘Not doing’ in times of crisis: agency and the urgency of pause and restraint
- STS and Political Ecology: Exploring socially just and ecologically sustainable emerging worlds
- STS Underground: Locating Matter and Agency in emerging subterranean Worlds
- The Bio(Techno)logical Politics of Synchrony
- The Ontological Politics of the Anthropocene
- Waste. Locating, Learning From, and Living With the Lively Afterlives of Globalization’s Distributed Materialities
- What happens when we all agree: Governing non epistemic controversies
Audio Visual
- As Air Became this Number website by Hannah Husberg & Agata Marzecova
- Canadland Commons: Dynasties
- 99 Percent Invisible: Dollar Store Town
- Restart Radio – Secondhand Around the World with Adam Minter
- Of Ghost Foods and Culinary Extinction, Castropod, Nov 2019
- This Land: Still Bleeding
Positions and Opportunities
- Research Director, Center for Democracy & Technology, Washington, DC
- Assistant Professor ~ Sociology & Anthropology (STS), Nazareth College of Rochester, New York
- Full Professor (W2) in Sociology with a Focus on Social Research Methods, RWTH Aachen University
- Assistant Professorship in Ethics, Waseda University
- Assistant Professor—Gender, Social Justice and Health, York University
- Postdoctoral Fellow in Capitalism Studies, Dept of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
- Lecturer or Assistant Professor, Digital Sociology, Environmental Sociology, and Communities, Sociology, Mount Allison University
- Research Associate (m/f/d) with a Focus on Future Risk Trends, Adaptation and Transformation in Coastal Cities
- Post-Doctoral Associate Position in Design, Infrastructure, and Politics, Concordia University
- Postdoctoral fellowship: Ice and Society Interactions / Interdisciplinary Natural and Social Sciences, University of Oregon
- The Climate Museum Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Climate and Inequality
- Funded Master’s Position Announcement, Colorado School of Mines
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 and Europe.
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