Discard studies is a young field of research 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 February 2020.

Recent Discard Studies Posts

• A Bibliography of Trash Animals by Alex Zahara

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.

• Appelgren, Staffan. (2019). Creating with traces of life: waste, reuse and design. Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, 10(1): 65-75.
• Bell, Kirsten. (2020). Signs, things and packaging: Recovering the material agency of the cigarette packet. Social studies of science, 50(1), 30-49.
• Brown, Kate. (2019). Learning to read the great Chernobyl acceleration: literacy in the more-than-human landscapes. Current Anthropology, 60(S20), S198-S208.
• Corvellec, Hervé., Böhm, Steffen., Stowell, Alison., & Valenzuela, Francisco. (2020). Introduction to the special issue on the contested realities of the circular economy. Culture and Organization, 26(2), 96-102.
• Dembek, Ageta. (2020). Knitting an action net to reduce plastic waste: reusable takeout food containers in New York City. Culture and Organization, 159-174.
• Glabau, Dayna. (2019). Food Allergies and the Hygienic Sublime. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 5(2).
• Gong, Haomin. (2019). Place, Animals, and Human Beings: The Case of Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Waste. In Chinese Environmental Humanities (pp. 167-188). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
• Heidelberg, Roy L., and Sarah Surak. (2020). The Administrative Making of the Recycler. Policy Studies, 1–19.
• Hodgins, Kelly, & Parizeau, Kate. (2020). Farm-to-fork… and beyond? A call to incorporate food waste into food systems research. Food and Foodways, 1-18.
• Jaramillo, Pablo. (2020). Mining Leftovers: Making Futures on the Margins of Capitalism. Cultural Anthropology, 35(1), 48-73.
• Kębłowski, Wojciech., Lambert, Deborah., & Bassens, David. (2020). Circular economy and the city: an urban political economy agenda. Culture and Organization, 26(2), 142-158.
• Kettioui, Abdelmjid. (2020). Sarcasm and Taboo in the Moroccan Mediascape after the February 20 Movement. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 1-19.
• Kinchy, Abby. (2019). Contentious baselining: The politics of “pre-drilling” environmental measures in shale gas territory. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2514848619877585.
• Kole de Peralta, Kathleen. (2019). Mal Olor and Colonial Latin American History: Smellscapes in Lima, Peru, 1535–1614. Hispanic American Historical Review, 99(1), 1-30.
• Kuchinskaya, Olga. (2019). Citizen Science and the Politics of Environmental Data. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 44(5), 871-880.
• Landström, Catharina, & Kemp, Stewart. (2019). The power of place: How local engagement with geological disposal of radioactive waste re-situated technoscience and re-assembled the public. Science and Technology Studies. Early view.
• Melosi, Martin V. (2020). Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City. Columbia University Press.
• Paxson, Heather. (2019). “Don’t pack a pest”: parts, wholes, and the porosity of food borders. Food, Culture & Society, 22(5), 657-673.
• Pétursdóttir, Þóra. (2020). Anticipated futures? Knowing the heritage of drift matter. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 26(1), 87-103.
• Pratt, Susanne. (2019). Care, Toxics and Being Prey: I Want To Be Good Food for Others. Australian Feminist Studies, 34(102), 437-453.
• Reinert, Hugo. (2019). Requiem for a Junk-Bird: Violence, Purity and the Wild. Cultural Studies Review, 25(1), 29-40.
• Ross, Susan M. (2020). Re-Evaluating Heritage Waste: Sustaining Material Values through Deconstruction and Reuse. The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice, 1-27.
• Sedell, Jennifer. K. (2019). No fly zone? Spatializing regimes of perceptibility, uncertainty, and the ontological fight over quarantine pests in California. Geoforum.
• Spezio, Teresa Sabol. (2018). Slick Policy: Environmental and Science Policy in the Aftermath of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill. University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Tuçaltan, Gul. (2019). Informalization of waste regimes: The entanglement of urbanization, poverty and waste in Ankara. In Transforming Socio-Natures in Turkey (pp. 112-134). Routledge.
• van Veelen, Bregje, & Hasselbalch, Jacob. (2020). Power and politics in plastics research: A critique of ‘Whither plastics? petrochemicals, plastics and sustainability in a garbage-riddled world’. Energy Research & Social Science, 61, 101445.
• Völker, Thomas., Kovacic, Zora., & Strand, Roger. (2019). Indicator development as a site of collective imagination? The case of European Commission policies on the circular economy. Culture and Organization, 1-18.
• Zhang, Amy. (2020). Circularity and Enclosures: Metabolizing Waste with the Black Soldier Fly. Cultural Anthropology, 35(1), 74-103.
• Zwiers, Jakob., Jaeger-Erben, Melanie., & Hofmann, Florian. (2020). Circular literacy. A knowledge-based approach to the circular economy. Culture and Organization, 121-141.

Dissertations & Theses

• Paxton, Gillian Louise (2017). Wild urban companions: living with everyday native animals in Brisbane. PhD Dissertation: University of Queensland.

Book Reviews

• Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times by Alexis Shotwell. Review by Stephen Molldrem
• Edges of Exposures: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal, by Noémi Tousignant. Review by Kristin Peterson
• Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/personhood, by Megan H. Glick. Review by Sherryl Vint

Calls for Proposals & Participation

• Borrowed time: On death, dying, and change, call for conference participants, 2-4 November, Devon, UK. Deadline for abstracts: 29 March 2020.
• Extraction: Tracing the Veins, a virtual/nearly carbon-neutral conference, June 29 – July 10, 2020. Abstracts due March 6, 2020.
• Mining the Connections, call for conference participants, 2-5 November, Montreal, Canada. Deadline for abstracts: 31 March 2020.
• Novel Remediations: Assessing and redressing environmental harm beyond techno-modernism, 26-28 November 2020, Santiago and Tierra Amarilla, Chile. Call for presentations and workshop participants. Application deadline: 15 March 2020
• Settler Colonialism and Environmental Ethics, Special Issue of Environmental Ethics, Deadline for abstracts: 5pm, March 2 2020
• The Social World of Wildfires, Call for papers, Canadian Association of Geographer Annual Meeting, Victoria Canada. Deadline for abstracts: 15 March 2020 (deadline extended)
• Workshop: Timescapes of Mining, Freiberg (Saxony), Germany. August 16-17, 2020. Application deadline: February 29, 2020
• CFA: Workshop with Sheila Jasanoff “Politics of (un)desirable futures,” June 22-23 2020, Lille Catholic University, France Deadline: March 01 2020

Conferences & Symposia

• Beyond Extraction: A counter-conference. 27 February- 4 March 2020, Toronto, Ontario.
• Crip Maintenance/ Maintaining Crip. 9 April 2020, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario.
• Discard Studies Collaborative Conference: Exploring Disposal’s Past, Present, and Future. April 23-25, 2020, New York University, New York City.
• Pollution, Toxicity and Reparative Environmental Histories: A discussion, 25 March 2020, Ottawa, Canada.

Audio Visual

• For the Wild Podcast: #156, Dr. Max Liboiron: Reorienting within a world of plastic
• For the Wild Podcast: #159, Eriel Tchekwie Deranger: On Solidarity with Unist’ot’en
• Media Indigena: #196, Another paramilitary push against Wet’suwet’en camps in BC
• Jewish Museum of Maryland, exhibit on the history of the scrap industry

Positions

• PhD position in Making Waste History? Innovation for sustainable consumption (European/UK Students Only), University of Glasgow
• Post-Doc Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, Health Disparities Unit, NIH Intramural Research Program, National Human Genome Research Institute
• Interdisciplinary postdoc in “Sensing disasters,” Open University of Catalonia. Deadline for application: 1 March.

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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