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 January 2021.

Recent Discard Studies Posts

• Firsting in Research by Max Liboiron
• COVID-19 measures and industrial workplaces by  Nora Loreto
• Top 10 Discard Studies articles of 2020
• Nigeria’s COVID-19 waste management policy should include the informal sector by Chidi Nzeadibe and Adaeze Ejike-Alieji

Peer-reviewed 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.

We have begun posting the gender parity of The Dirt, especially given evidence that COVID-19 is increasing the skew in knowledge production to be ever more male, white, and childless. This bibliography is 53.6% percent women authors, based on Dr. Jane Summer’s  Gender Balance Assessment Tool. This is the first Dirt to have more women than men authors since we’ve been recording gender figures, likely thanks to a call out via Twitter where we mentioned that over 90% of the people who send us notice of their publications (which we love!) are white men. Keep those notices coming, women/non-binary/tw-spirit/trans/gender minitory authors!

• Althaf, Shahana, Babbitt, Callie, Chen, Roger. (2020). The evolution of consumer electronic waste in the U.S.. J Ind Ecol.; 1– 14.
• Bresnihan, Patrick, and Arielle Hesse. (2020). Political ecologies of infrastructural and intestinal decay. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.
• Calkins, Sandra. (2020). Lab hands and knowing toxic substances in Uganda. Anthropology Today, 36(6), 29-32.
• Crosby, Alexandra, and Jesse Adams Stein. (2020). Repair. Environmental Humanities, 12(1), 179-185.
• Eitel, Kathrin (2020). PlastiCorona: Who Cares About That Waste? In: Social Anthropology 28 (2), 261–262.
• Geissler, Wenzel.,  Prince, Ruth J. (2020). ‘Toxic worldings’: Introduction to toxic flows. Anthropology Today, 36(6), 3-4.
• Harvey, Penny. (2020). Radiation as social relation. Anthropology Today, 36(6), 13-16.
• Helliwell Richard, Raman Sujatha, Morris Carol. (2020). Environmental imaginaries and the environmental sciences of antimicrobial resistance. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.
• Herrick, Clare. (2020). The optics of noncommunicable diseases: from lifestyle to environmental toxicity. Sociology of Health & Illness, 42(5), 1041-1059.
• Ialenti, Vincent. (2021) Drum breach: Operational temporalities, error politics and WIPP’s kitty litter nuclear waste accident. Social Studies of Science.
• Jack, Tullia, Manisha Anantharaman, and Alison L. Browne. (2020). ‘Without cleanliness we can’t lead the life, no?’Cleanliness practices,(in) accessible infrastructures, social (im) mobility and (un) sustainable consumption in Mysore, India. Social & Cultural Geography, 1-22.
• Jenkins, Kristen E., Sovacool, Benjamin K., Mouter, Niek, Hacking, Nick, Burns, Mary-Kate, & McCauley, Darren. (2020). The methodologies, geographies, and technologies of energy justice: A systematic and comprehensive review. Environmental Research Letters.
• Kenner, Alison. (2020). Scrapping the Workshop of the World: Civic Infrastructuring and the Politics of Late Industrial Governance. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 6, 514-533.
• Kopf, Charline. (2020). The dynamics of toxic dust. Anthropology Today, 36(6), 17-20.
• Molloy Murphy, A. (2020). Plastic City: A Small-Scale Experiment for Disrupting Normative Borders. Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario (AECEO) 4(1), 14.
• Saraç-Lesavre, Başak. (2020). Deep time financing?‘Generational’responsibilities and the problem of rendez-vous in the US nuclear waste programme. Journal of Cultural Economy, 1-14.
• Shcheglovitova, Mariya. (2020). Dawn of the lively dead: Living queerly with rot in the sustainable city. Social & Cultural Geography, 1-16.
• Sholanke, Dare and Jutta Guberlet (2020). Informal Recycling in Vancouver: binners’ challenges and opportunities. In: Info From the Global World. Eds. Maria Cristina Lavagnolo and Marc Kalina. Detritus. 13: I-IV.
• Soma, Tammara. (2017). Gifting, ridding and the “everyday mundane”: the role of class and privilege in food waste generation in Indonesia. Local Environment, 22(12), 1444-1460.
• Shattuck, Annie. (2021). Toxic uncertainties and epistemic emergence: understanding pesticides and health in Lao PDR. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(1), 216-230.
• Tessaro, Laura. (2020). Potency and Power Estrogen, Cosmetics, and Labeling in Canadian Regulatory Practices, 1939-1953. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 6(1).
• Thieme, Tatiana. (2021). ‘Youth are redrawing the map’: temporalities and terrains of the hustle economy in Mathare, Nairobi. Africa, 91(1), 35-56.
• Tousignant, Noémi. (2020). Toxic residues of Senegal’s peanut economy. Anthropology Today, 36(6), 5-8.
• Tucker, Jennifer L., & Anantharaman, Manisha. (2020). Informal work and sustainable cities: from formalization to reparation. One Earth, 3(3), 290-299.
• Ureta, Sebastian. (2021). Ruination Science: Producing Knowledge from a Toxic World. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 46(1), 29-52.
• Wittmer, Josie. (2020). “We live and we do this work”: Women waste pickers’ experiences of wellbeing in Ahmedabad, India. World Development. 
• Wishart, Lucy J., & Bebbington, Jan. (2020). Zero waste governance: a Scottish case study. International Journal of Sustainable Development, 23(1-2), 128-147.
• Woodworth, Max D. (2020). Picturing Urban China in Ruin:“Ghost City” Photography and Speculative Urbanization. GeoHumanities, 6(2), 233-251.

Theses and Dissertations

• Degray, Amanda (2020) Indigenous risk perceptions and land-use in Yellowknife, NT. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
• Wittmer, Josie. (2020). Women’s work in the ‘clean city’: Perspectives on wellbeing, waste governance, and inclusion from the urban margins in Ahmedabad, India. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Guelph.

Calls for Proposals & Participation

• Call for Contributors: Environmental Histories of the Future, NiCHE

The following are calls for papers for Special sessions in the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) conference, online & at Toronto, October 6-9:

• Toxic Goodness: Harmful Legacies, Hopeful Futures
• Un/Making a Difference: The possibilities of extra-ordinary acts of mundane resistance
• Aerotechnologies: Air as Elemental Technology
•  (Re)materialising Cancer: Bodies, Cells and Environments
• Good and bad relations: Exploring the intersection of multiple forms of citizen science, law and environmental governance
• Good Governance, Good Relations, and (Nuclear) Waste Management
• Mediation, Probability, and Environmental Risk
• Scaling the Ethical Plateaus of Energy Justice
• Toxic Entanglements: acting on slow, invisible, and emerging realities
• Sense ecologies: new technologies and strategies of environmental surveillance
• Using Speculative Fictions for Pedagogical/Research Applications Centered Around Environmental Stewardship, Responsibility, and Responsible Innovation
• Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities
• DISEASED LANDSCAPES: Health and Illness in Territories of Extraction
• Emergence in Environmental Infrastructures
• Ferment as Method: Creating the Conditions for Transformative Relations
• Food for care: Interrogating practices of eating in troubled worlds
• Governing Environmental Inequalities: Towards a New Research-Action Framework on Agency, Power & Multispecies Justice

Positions

• Open rank position in Race, Racism and/or Racial Inequality, Sociology, Columbia University
• Assistant Professor in Public History/Public Humanities, History, University of Louisville
• Assistant professor, Indigeneity and Decolonization, Sociology, York University
• Postdoc on climate change, terrorism risk and insurability, University of Queensland. Must already have right to work in Australia.
• Executive Director, Rich Earth Institute
• Southeast Asian Environmental History PhD Scholarship, Murdoch University
• 5 Postdocs in Global Racial Justice, Rutgers 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 and Europe.

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