If non-Ghanaians are aware of Old Fadama/Agbogbloshie at all it is probably as the purported largest e-waste dump on Earth. This is a drastically mistaken image. The evictions that began a few days ago are only the most recent event in a longer struggle over land rights in Accra that have nothing to do with where the ‘West’s’ e-waste goes to die.
Our project aims to unveil the potential for the Commons within the outdoor urban infrastructure of Churchill Square in St. John’s, Newfoundland, by locating heat leaks from wasted heat. We wanted to find out which areas in the Square provided a bit of warmth during the long, cold winter to imagine the possibility of public congregation or reclaimed community space.
“All this actually works. I mean there was so much that we didn’t know, that we still don’t know. There were so many mistakes that the industry made at the beginning. Look at Vienna, where there were some really, really bad mistakes in the 1980s. There was so much planning and preparation and calculation that went into this – and it really just works. My wish is simply for it to just be able to keep working as it has been.”
Rob Nixon’s book shows how the invisible, destructive impacts of neoliberalism stretch across vast spatial and temporal scales. Within this history, profits are internalized and risks exacerbated as they are offloaded on poor communities.
In this panel, we seek to explore the geographies of waste locally and internationally. We seek to understand patterns of global and domestic governance of waste, broadly defined.
Like queer theory, discard studies is interested in uneven remainders, things that don’t fit neatly into categories. Both concern themselves with the strange and imperfect construction of divisions that do violence to humans, cultures, and environments, while still attending to the fact that these divisions have meaning for people, that they are strategic, and that they structure our thought in ways that are almost impossible to escape.
Abjection describes a social and psychological process by which things like garbage, sewage, corpses and rotting food elicit powerful emotional responses like horror and disgust.
Through a series of interrelated programs, Producing Waste/Producing Space seeks to locate points of intersection between the study of waste and strategies for waste in space.
Originally posted on The Disorder Of Things:
Sent from Taipei, the penultimate post in a container ship ethnography. More here. ? An APL vessel heads out of the port of Hong Kong On our thirteenth day at sea, after having been battered by 6 meter waves and snow, gale-force winds and storm, having watched the ship’s…
The 40 most influential environmental justice conflicts in recent American history are now included in a Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. In the United States, decades of research have documented a strong correlation between the location of environmental burdens and the racial/ethnic background of the most impacted residents.
Discard Studies 