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 2021.

Recent Discard Studies Posts

• On Wishcycling by Rebecca Altman
• Firsting in Research by Max Liboiron
• COVID-19 measures and industrial workplaces by Nora Loreto

Peer-reviewed articles 

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 41.26% percent women authors, based on Dr. Jane Summer’s  Gender Balance Assessment Tool.

• Cochoy, Franck. (2021). Patents as Vehicles of Social and Moral Concerns: The Case of Johnson & Johnson Disposable Feminine Hygiene Products (1925–2012). Science, Technology, & Human Values, 0162243921992861. Keywords: patents, concerns, feminine hygiene products, health, environment
• Engelmann, Sasha, & McCormack, Derrick. (2021). Elemental worlds: Specificities, exposures, alchemies. Progress in Human Geography, 0309132520987301. Keywords: alchemy,  elements,  exposure,  media,  milieu,  orientations, specificity, worlds
• Fish, Adam. (2020). Crash Theory: Entrapments of Conservation Drones and Endangered Megafauna. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 0162243920920356. Keywords: drone, crash, endangered species, entanglement, natureculture, entrapment, programmability, repair, technoliberalism, UAV
• Foltz, Mary C. (2020). Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture: American Shi*t. Springer Nature.
• Gillespie, Kathryn. (2020). The afterlives of the lively commodity: Life-worlds, death-worlds, rotting-worlds. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 0308518X20944417. Keywords: Commodity, capital, afterlives, animal, agriculture
• Hinchliffe, Steve. (2021). Postcolonial Global Health, Post-Colony Microbes and Antimicrobial Resistance. Theory, Culture & Society, 0263276420981606. Keywords: global health, materiality, postcolonial theory, resistance
• Johnson, Charlotte., Bell, Sarah., Borrion, Aiduan., & Comber, Rob. (2021). Working with infrastructural communities: a material participation approach to urban retrofit. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 46(2), 320-345. Keywords: consumption, material participation, sustainable design, urban sustainability, water–energy–food nexus, retrofit, infrastructure, STS
• MacGregor, Sherilyn. (2020). Making matter great again? Ecofeminism, new materialism and the everyday turn in environmental politics. Environmental Politics, 1-20. Keywords: Environmentalism, everyday life, new/sustainable materialism, green/ecofeminist political theory
• Mansfield, Becky. (2020). Deregulatory science: Chemical risk analysis in Trump’s EPA. Social Studies of Science, 0306312720970284. Keywords: Environmental Protection Agency, Trump, risk analysis, science, deregulation
• Miller, Jacob. C., Prieto, Manuel., & Vila, Xurxo M. Ayán. (2020). The geopolitics of presence and absence at the ruins of Fort Henry. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0263775820960149. Keywords: Contemporary archaeology, assemblage, embodiment, ruins, subjectivity, Chile
• O’Donovan, Órla. (2020). Wax Moulages and the Pastpresence Work of the Dead. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 0162243920909891. Keywords: wax moulages, human remains, agential assemblage, pastpresence work, Mother and Baby Homes
• Purifoy, Danielle. M., & Seamster, Louise. (2020). Creative extraction: Black towns in white space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0263775820968563. Keywords: Racial contract, racial capitalism, underdevelopment, incorporation, municipalities, infrastructure
• Sullivan, Marianne, Chris Sellers, Leif Fredrickson, Alissa Cordner, Ellen Kohl, and Jennfer Liss Ohayon (2021). Re-envisioning EPA and its work in the post-Trump era: perspectives from EPA employees. Journal of Public Health Policy, 1-17. Keywords: waste studies, Environmental Protection Agency, Environmental regulation, Environmental health policy, Environmental justice
• Summers, Brandi Thompson (2020). Reclaiming the chocolate city: Soundscapes of gentrification and resistance in Washington, DC. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 0263775820978242. Keywords: Gentrification, black geographies, aesthetics, sound, Washington, DC
• Tantchou, Josiane Carine. (2020). Medical disposals and problem solving: About high blood pressure in Morocco. Social Studies of Science, 0306312720946487. Keywords: medical disposal, problem-solving, high blood pressure, Morocco

Theses and Dissertations

• Fried, Talia. (2020) “It’s Not Just Garbage—It’s Waste”: Conceptualizing the Social, Historical and Epistemic Grounds of Municipal Solid Waste Treatment in Israel. (Doctoral Dissertation: Bar Ilan University)
• Lampel, Linda. (2020). Value Capture and Distribution in Second-Hand Clothing Trade. (Master’s thesis: Universität Wien)

Calls for Proposals & Participation

• Call for chapters: Difficult Death: Challenging Cultural Representations of Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture, Abstracts due May 1st, 2021
  
• Call for participants: Infstractural Times paper workshop, Abstracts due March 1st, 2021
• CFP: International Conference on Environmental Crises in the Indian Ocean World since 1800. Abstracts due March 1st, 2021
• CFP: Racism, Power, and Justice: Achieving Population Health Equity conference, Abstracts due March 1st, 2021

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
• (Im)material streams in the city: ecologies, economies, electrons

Conferences & Symposia

• Discarded: Understanding and Unmasking the Waste Stream, 6 March 2021, Online
• The Material Life of Time, 15th-17th March 2021, Online

Audio/Visual

• Anti-Racism Daily, Online newsletter
• Canadaland Commons: The Police
• welcome? A podcast telling stories about colonised landscapes, and the people who meet in them.
• Ologies podcast– Urban rodentology (SEWER RATS!) with Bobby Corrigan

Positions

• Assistant Professor, Africana Studies, Drexel University
• Assistant Professor, Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, University of Guelph
• Doctoral thesis positions in Marine Political Ecology, University of Oldenburg
• Junior fellowships, Young Academy for Sustainability Research
• KLI Dissertation writing fellowship, Dealing with diversity in the life and sustainability sciences
• Lecturer, Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College
• PhD position in Benthic Geopolitics, University of Oldenburg
• PhD scholarships, Australian National University
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Studies of Scientific Data Governance, Preservation and Archiving, University of Texas
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Centre for Urban Environments, University of Toronto
• Postdoctoral Researcher in microbiome discourses, Colorado State University
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Studies of Scientific Data Governance, Colorado State University
• Postdoc positions in Digital Innovation at SCDI in Umeå, Gothenburg and Stockholm

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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