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 June 2021.

Call for a new Managing Editor, Discard Studies

Starting in the early fall of 2021, we are looking for a new Managing Editor to oversee and carry out regular operations of Discard Studies and to create a new vision for the platform. Deadline: July 15. Details are here. 

Recent Discard Studies Posts

• Miss Tampon Liberty by by Camilla Mørk Røstvik
• 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

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 62.5% percent women-authored based on the Summers Gender Balance Assessment Tool.

• Blue, Gwendolyn, Kelly Bronson, and Alana Lajoie-O’Malley. (2021). Beyond distribution and participation: A scoping review to advance a comprehensive environmental justice framework for impact assessment. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 90, 106607. Keywords: Environmental justice, Impact assessment, Recognition, Distribution, Representation
• Corvellec, Hervé. (2019). Waste as scats: For an organizational engagement with waste. Organization, 26(2), 217-235. Keywords: Anthropocene, biosemiotics, circular economy, Leonia, material responsibility, value, waste
• Davies, Thom. (2021). “Geography, time, and toxic pollution: slow observation in Louisiana” in A Research Agenda for Geographies of Slow violence. Eds. O’Lear, S.
• Dini, Rachele. (2021). “Resurrected from its Own Sewers”: Waste, Landscape, and the Environment in JG Ballard’s 1960s Climate Fiction. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 28(1), 207-229.
• Rentetzi, Maria, and Kenji Ito. (2021). The material culture and politics of artifacts in nuclear diplomacy. Centaurus.

Reports and other publications

• Altman, Rebecca. (2021). Upriver: A researcher traces the legacy of plastics. Orion.
• Miller, D. (2021). Orphan Wells. Places.
• IPEN. (2021). Plastic Waste Poisoning Food and Threatening Communities in Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America

Special Issues

• TRASH/TREASURE in Labocine (launches July 1)

Reviews

• Review of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yussof, Cooper Weissman
• Review of Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa after Independence by Abena Dove Osseo-Asare by  DAMILOLA ADEBAYO
• Review of Materielle Kultur und Konsum in der Frühen Neuzeit [Material culture and consumption in the early modern era] edited by Julia A. Schmidt-Funke | REINHOLD REITH
• Review of The Anthropocene and the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability by Carolyn Merchant | HARRY LINTSEN 
• Review of Recycling and Reuse in the Roman Economy edited by Chloë N. Duckworth and Andrew Wilson | ALLISON L. C. EMMERSON
• Review of A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran’s Age of Cholera by Amir A. Afkhami | KIM CLARK
• Review of Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigation by Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris | BRAD BOLMAN
• The violence and promise of infrastructural discards, a review of Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia, 2019. Waste siege: The life of infrastructure in Palestine. By R. Fredvericks.

Audio/Visual

• Capitalist Discard, Durability, and Romani Racialized Labor in the Anthropocene: A Conversation with Elana Resnick, Mergers & Acquisitions podcast, Society for Economic Anthropology
• Life and Livability at the Dump: A Conversation with Kathleen Millar, Mergers & Acquisitions podcast, Society for Economic Anthropology
• Dumpster Diving, a Food Sharing Revolution, and Economies of Abjection: A Conversation with David Giles, Mergers & Acquisitions podcast, Society for Economic Anthropology
• Pollution is Colonialism: Part 1. Media Indigena, Episode 258.
• Pollution is Colonialism: Part 2 Media Indigena, Episode 259.
• “The People of Waste. Living Plastics” (2019). Dir. Rémi de Bercegol, Grant Davis and Shankare Gowda

Calls for papers/submissions

• ENERGY ETHICS 2021: ENERGY TRANSITIONS & PLANETARY FUTURES. Due 30^th of July
• Join the Waste, Pollution, and Toxicities working group with the Royal Geographical Society
• Modernities in the Contact Zone: Translating across Unfamiliar Objects. 9th Postcolonial Narrations Postgraduate Forum of GAPS hosted by the University of Potsdam from October 21-23 2021. Due July 18
• Defining the Human in Environmental Humanities, Venice International University, June 9-11, 2022. Deadline: Oct 1, 2021

Conferences & Symposia

• 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 Sociology of Science and Technology, Technical University of Munich. Due July 18
• Tenure-Track Faculty Position (Associate Professor), Anti-racism by design, Univeristy of Michigan. Deadline: Aug 15
• PhD-position: Buddhist pilgrimage in the Anthropocene, The Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
• Lecturer in Social Anthropology, UCL. Deadline: July 4
• Academic Fellows (multiple positions), University of Sydney. Deadline July 5.
• Managing Editor, Discard Studies. Remote. Deadline: July 15

New Patrons

Discard Studies is funded, in part, by the generous patronage of our readers, via Patreon. New patrons this month include:

• Alison Stowell. So generous!
• Tim Kastelle. Thank you!

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

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