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 March 2021.

Recent Discard Studies Posts

• Taboos around menstruation are leading to a growing environmental crisis in India by Mariana Lopez
• On Wishcycling by Rebecca Altman
• Firsting in Research by Max Liboiron

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 about 64% percent women-authored.

• Feltrin, Lorenzo, and Devi Sacchetto. (2021). The work-technology nexus and working-class environmentalism: Workerism versus capitalist noxiousness in Italy’s Long 1968. Theory and Society, 1-21. Keywords: Future of work, Petrochemical industry, Technology, Toxicity, Workerism, Working-class environmentalism
• Folkers, Andreas. (2021). Fossil modernity: The materiality of acceleration, slow violence, and ecological futures. Time & Society, 0961463X20987965. Keywords: Social theory, modernity, temporality, carbon, climate change, plastic, new materialisms, anthropocene
• Luedee, Jonathan. (2021). Locating the Boundaries of the Nuclear North: Arctic Biology, Contaminated Caribou, and the Problem of the Threshold. Journal of the History of Biology, 1-27. Keywords:  Radioactive exposures, Nuclearity, Caribou, Historical geography of northern science, Contaminants, Nuclear history, Northern Canada
• Krasnodębski, Marcin. (2021). Upscaling Forest Waste: The French Quest for Fuel Autarky after World War I. Technology and Culture, 62(1), 105-127. Keywords: national fuel, gasifier, wood alcohol, autarky, expectations, France
• Martinez-Alier, Joan. (2021). Mapping ecological distribution conflicts: The EJAtlas. The Extractive Industries and Society. Keywords: Ecological distribution conflicts, Circular economy, Commodity frontiers, Environmentalism of the poor
• Resnick, Elana. (2021). The Limits of Resilience: Managing Waste in the Racialized Anthropocene. American Anthropologist. Keywords: waste, labor, race, Bulgaria
• Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia C. (2020). Failure to build: Sewage and the choppy temporality of infrastructure in Palestine. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2514848620908193. Keywords: Temporality, infrastructure, environment, waste, sovereignty
• Svingstedt, Anette, Hervé Corvellec, and Emma Samsioe. (2020). The Normality of Industrial and Commercial Waste: Economic, Technical and Organisational Barriers to Waste Prevention. Detritus, (13), 3. Keywords: Waste prevention, Practice, theory, Industrial waste, Commercial waste

Theses and Dissertations

• Monje, Luis. (2020). A short conundrum on material waste defamiliarization and creative accessibility. Master’s Thesis, Aalto University. Keywords: waste, defamiliarization, value, creativity, alienation, resources
• Newton, Robert. (2021). ‘Insidious Pollen’: Literature and Industrial Toxicity, 1935-Present (Doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge).

Audio/Visual

• Menstruation and Modern Materials (online exhibit), Science Museum, London
• Treasures in the Trash, a film on the Molina Collection, Nicholas Heller
• Aidan Tynan book talk: The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics
• Lesley Green book talk: Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa
• Rocio Gomez book talk: Silver Veins, Dusty Lungs: Mining, Water, and Public Health in Zacatecas, 1835-1946
• Thom van Dooren book talk: The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds
• Eva Haifa Giraud book talk: What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion

Reviews

• “How to Write about Pipelines,” by Sakshi Aravind, of Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline
• Review of Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization by On Barak by Franz-Josef Brüggemeier
• Review of Pollution, Politics, and Power: The Struggle for Sustainable Electricity by Tom McGarity | William Boyd
• Review of Face à la puissance. Une histoire des énergies alternatives à l’âge industriel [Facing power: A history of alternative energies in the industrial age] edited by François Jarrige and Alexis Vrignon | Clarence Hatton-Proulx
• Review of Deutschlands Ölfelder. Eine Stoffgeschichte der Kulturpflanze Raps (1897–2017) [Germany’s oil fields: A material history of the crop plant rapeseed (1897–2017)] by Sarah Waltenberger | Jens Soentgen
• Review of Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States by Lee Vinsel | Stefan Esselborn

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
  
• Alternatives to the Anthropocene, Radical History Review, Deadline June 1, 2021
• Sixth Biennial Conference of East Asian Environmental History on theme Human and Nature in East Asia: Exploring New Directions in Environmental History, Deadline to submit March 31
• ‘Urban soils – troubles, visibilities & opportunities’. Institute of Australian Geographers & New Zealand Geographical Society Combined Conference. Abstracts due by 5 April
• Degrowth Conference for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity “Caring Communities for Radical Change”. Abstracts due April 6

Conferences & Symposia

• Re-opening the bin – Waste, economy, culture and society, University of Gothenburg, June 10-12. Online.
• Sixth Biennial Conference of East Asian Environmental History on theme Human and Nature in East Asia: Exploring New Directions in Environmental History, September 7-10 (Tuesday-Friday), 2021. Online.
• Join an online Energy History working group

Positions

• Doctoral Award on Indigenous arts and Environmental Justice, University of Kent, Canterbury, Closing date: Friday 7th May 2021
• 2 full-time permanent lecturers in International Relations (any sub-field, ref UOS027774), Sheffield University, closing date 12 April
• 2 PhD scholarships, Australian National University’s Centre for Environmental History for Placing Planetary Change: An Environmental History of Climate Change in the Southern Hemisphere. Apply by April 15
• Lecturer in Black British History, University of Edinburgh, April 1 deadline
• Associate Professor in American Studies, University of Oslo
• 12 Doctoral positions in Environmental Humanities, Environmental Science Center (WZU) of the University of Augsburg and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) of the LMU
• 2 researchers (postdoc type, 17 month appointment) in modern international history of natural resources, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
• ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN HYDROCLIMATIC AND SOCIETAL INTERACTIONS AND DATA SCIENCE, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

If you have an item to add to The Dirt, please contact editors@discardstudies.com. 

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