Discard Studies is supported by an editorial team. This team writes and solicits posts, manages guest author pitches, and supports the day-to-day financial, technical, and administrative aspects of the Discard Studies in line with long-term goals for supporting the field.

Jesi Taylor Cruz, Collaborating Editor
Jesi Taylor Cruz is a writer, doula, archivist, compost educator, and TRUE advisor whose research lies at the intersection of Genocide Studies, Political Theory, Disability Studies, Anti-Colonial Science, Black Radical Ecology, and the Political Ecology of Waste. Her primary focus is the impact of waste-based structural violence on marginalized, colonized, and criminalized communities. When they’re not reading or researching, they’re birding, dancing, or exploring local farms with their child. As a visitor on stolen Lenape Land, who is a descendant of enslaved Africans who were forcibly removed from their homelands, she is committed to actively combatting settler colonialism while embracing ancestral wisdom concerning caring for the Lands and waters they are in relation to.

Josh Lepawsky, Collaborating Editor
Josh Lepawsky is Professor of Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Questions informing his research include where and how are contemporary discards made? Where do they travel and where do their effects accumulate? Who gets what discards, where, how, and under what conditions? He is also interested in how maintenance and repair, broadly conceived, might offer both literal and figurative lessons for figuring out how to live well together in permanently polluted and always breaking worlds. More information about Josh Lepawsky’s work can be found at here.

Robin Nagle, Managing Editor
Robin Nagle is the author of Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and since 2006 has been anthropologist-in-residence with New York’s Department of Sanitation. An oral history archive she established with the DSNY is an ongoing collaborative effort between Nagle, her students, and Sanitation folks. As a Sanitation Foundation board member, Nagle is part of the effort to found a Museum of Sanitation. She teaches anthropology, environmental studies, and discard studies at New York University. She co-founded Discard Studies with Max Liboiron in 2010.

Alex Zahara, Collaborating Editor
Alex Zahara (Settler, He/Him) is a PhD Candidate at Memorial University of Newfoundland interested in feminist, queer and anti-colonial interventions into contemporary environmental management practices. His current research examines the intersections of settler colonialism and wildfire management near his home community in Treaty 6 Territory, northern Saskatchewan. His work on waste has been published in the collections Anthropocene Feminism (University of Minnesota Press), Inevitably Toxic (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Environmental Humanities. He was a 2018 Visiting Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute in Melbourne, Australia.

Max Liboiron, Former Managing Editor
Max Liboiron (Michif, they/them) no longer works for Discard Studies, but was its managing editor from 2011 to 2021, first as a graduate student and then as an Assistant, then Associate professor. They are now director of Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory whose methods foreground humility and good land relations. Liboiron’s book, Pollution is Colonialism, was published by Duke University Press in April 2021. Dr. Liboiron is an Associate Professor in Geography and is formerly the Associate Vice-President (Indigenous Research) at Memorial University.  www.maxliboiron.com