The Dirt
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 May, 2021.
Recent Discard Studies Posts
- Reading Lists: Waste Colonialism and Palestine
- A Moral Politics of Blame by Sneha Sharma
- Waste and Recycling in Cold War Eastern Europe: The Case of the “Bee” Waste Collection Trust in Hungary by Viktor Pál
- 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 & 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 about 38.5% percent women-authored based on the Summers Gender Balance Assessment Tool.
- Ahamed, Ashiq, Andrei Veksha, Apostolos Giannis, and Grzegorz Lisak. (2021). Flexible Packaging Plastic Waste – Environmental Implications, Management Solutions, and the Way Forward. Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering 32.
- Allon, Fiona, Ruth Barcan, and Karma Eddison-Cogan. (Eds.). (2020). The Temporalities of Waste: Out of Sight, Out of Time. Routledge.
- Barlas, Pınar, Styliani Kleanthous, Kyriakos Kyriakou, and Jahna Otterbacher. (2021). Person, Human, Neither: The Dehumanization Potential of Automated Image Tagging. In Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES ’21), 11.
- Blue, S., E. Shove, and M.P. Kelly. (2021). Obese Societies: Reconceptualising the Challenge for Public Health. Sociology of Health and Illness.
- Bruns, Charlotte, and Matthias Sommer. (2021). Problematising Plastic: A Visual Analysis of the ‘Jute not Plastic’Campaign, 1976–1979 (Switzerland, Germany, Austria). Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 4(1). Keywords: visual sociology, social movements, framing plastic
- Cameron, Fiona. (2021). The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation: In a More-than-Human World. Routledge.
- Calkins, Sandra. (2021). Toxic remains: Infrastructural failure in a Ugandan molecular biology lab. Social Studies of Science, 03063127211011531. Keywords: toxicity, infrastructure, postcolonial technoscience, molecular biology, Uganda
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Falkoff, Rebecca R. (2021). Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding. Cornell University Press.
- Harrington, Elise, and Anne Wacera Wambugu. (2021) Beyond Technical Standards: Creating an Ecosystem for Quality and Repair in Kenya’s off-Grid Solar Sector. Energy Research & Social Science 77 (July 1, 2021): 102101.
- Holmberg, Tora, and Malin Ideland. (2021). The Circular Economy of Food Waste: Transforming Waste to Energy through ‘Make-up’ Work. Journal of Material Culture.
- Hood, Kate Lewis. (2021). In the ‘Fissures of Infrastructure’: Poetry and Toxicity in ‘Garbage Arcadia.’ Environmental Humanities 13, no. 1: 136–58. Keywords: poetics, toxic infrastructures, waste, transcorporeality, settler colonialism
- Ialenti, Vincent. (2021). Drum breach: Operational temporalities, error politics and WIPP’s kitty litter nuclear waste accident. Social Studies of Science, 0306312720986609. Keywords: nuclear waste, accidents, temporality, regulation, subcontracting
- Iheka, Cajetan. (2021). The Media Turn in African Environmentalism: The Niger Delta and Oil’s Network Forms. Journal of Visual Culture 20, no. 1: 60–84.
- Inverardi-Ferri, Carlo. (2021). Towards a Cultural Political Economy of the Illicit. Progress in Human Geography.
- O’Hare, Patrick. (2021). Cambridge, Carnaval, and the ‘Actually Existing Circularity’ of Plastics. Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 4(1):4. Keywords: plastic, waste, Uruguay, re-use, recycling, circular economy
- Obringer, Renee, Benjamin Rachunok, Debora Maia-Silva, Maryam Arbabzadeh, Roshanak Nateghi, and Kaveh Madani. (2021). The Overlooked Environmental Footprint of Increasing Internet Use. Resources, Conservation and Recycling 167 (April 2021): 105389.
- Pasek, Anne. (2021). Carbon Vitalism: Life and the Body in Climate Denial. Environmental Humanities 13, no. 1: 1–20.
- Privitera, Elisa, Marco Armiero, and Filippo Gravagno. (2021). Seeking justice in risk landscapes. Small data and toxic autobiographies from an Italian petrochemical town (Gela, Sicily). Local Environment, 1-25. Keywords: Environmental injustice, industrial contamination, Sicily, small data, toxic autobiographies
- Rengel-Gonçalves, Ana Paula, & Aydos, Elena. (2021). No Time to Waste: Payment for Urban Environmental Services as a Tool to Support Invisible Recyclers in Brazil. Oregon Law Review.
- Salmon, D., C.W. Babbitt, G.A. Babbitt, and C.E. Wilmer. (2021). A Framework for Modeling Fraud in E-Waste Management. Resources, Conservation and Recycling 171.
- Stanes, Elyse. (2020). Lingering matter: Materialities, temporalities and waste in clothes. In The Temporalities of Waste (pp. 122-135). Routledge.
- Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia. Off the Grid: Prepaid Power and the Political Economy of Waste in Palestine. In Political Economy of Palestine : Critical, Interdisciplinary, and Decolonial Perspectives, edited by Alaa Tartir, Tariq Dana, and Timothy Seidel, 297–319. Middle East Today. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
- Steger, Brigitte, Patrick O’Hare, and Teresa Sandra Perez. (2021). Introduction to special collection: social science and the social life of plastics. Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies.
- Turner, Andrew, Tracey Williams, and Tom Pitchford. (2021). Transport, Weathering and Pollution of Plastic from Container Losses at Sea: Observations from a Spillage of Inkjet Cartridges in the North Atlantic Ocean. Environmental Pollution 284.
- Wang, Kun, Junxi Qian, and Shenjing He. (2021). Contested Worldings of E-Waste Environmental Justice: Nonhuman Agency and E-Waste Scalvaging in Guiyu, China. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1–20.
- Wang, Tong, Peter Berrill, Julie B. Zimmerman, and Edgar G. Hertwich. (2021). Copper Recycling Flow Model for the United States Economy: Impact of Scrap Quality on Potential Energy Benefit. Environmental Science and Technology 55, no. 8: 5485–95.
- Werner, Marion, Christian Berndt, and Becky Mansfield. (2021). The Glyphosate Assemblage: Herbicides, Uneven Development, and Chemical Geographies of Ubiquity. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1–17.
Reports and other publications
- Wang, Xiaowei and Josh Lepawsky. (2021). Where is Repair? Computer repair in the European Union. The WIRE Journal.
Theses and Dissertations
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Satyawan, Akshata. (2021). Critical Assessment of Circular Economy Regarding Waste Reduction and Optimal Use of Resources. Private University of Applied Sciences.
Audio/Visual
- Cyber Waste
- Pollution is Colonialism: Part 1. Media Indigena, Episode 258.
Conferences & Symposia
- Waste Now! Histories and Contemporalities of Discards Online Conference Program, 4 & 8-10 June, 2021.
- Intimate Toxicities, 2021 MaGrann Conference, Rutgers University, 6-7 May, online
- 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.
- STREAMS – Transformative Environmental Humanities, 3–7 August 2021. Online.
Positions
- Professor of Racial Justice in Science and Technology Policy — University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Deadline: July 1, 2021
If you have an item to add to The Dirt, please contact editors@discardstudies.com.
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