A new article by Josh Lepawsky argues against the popular notion that e-waste travels predominantly from ‘developed’ countries to ‘undeveloped’ countries, and what this change means for regulation and recycling practices.
The Globe at Night project is an international citizen-science campaign to measure the impact of light pollution. It invites citizen-scientists (aka: you) to measure their night sky brightness and submit their observations from a computer or smart phone. Yet, gathering information for a scientific project is really a side effect of the goals of the project, which is to raise awareness of the problem. While my views on awareness campaigns tend toward the critical, in many ways this is a campaign for infrastructural awareness.
Waste advocacy and popular environmentalism suffer from a constant mismatch of scales. Problems are at one scale, and solutions are at another. This article calls for shift in cultural discourses that include proportion and scale so that information, problem identification, and proposed solutions are able to intervene into problems in meaningful and effective ways.
The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, is showing Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950 until May 2014.
The journey from awareness to behavior change is a long and arduous one, and few make it. Even for those who change their behavior, the scale of the change is often too small to impact the problem at hand. So what do we do?
In this special issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, authors reflect on how, when and why art has been used to articulate destruction over the past decades. Their essays are a glimpse into the topics that were recently discussed at the 2013 Doomsday Clock Symposium in Washington, DC.
This review of Nikhil Anand’s dissertation, Infrapolitics: The Social Life of Water in Mumbai, written by Tarini Bedi, will be of interest to discard studies scholars because of the methodological approach and how it highlights the politics of infrastructure.
f you look at enough photographs of disasters, you will see people posing with high water marks. It is a genre of photography onto itself: over and over, they will point to the mark, put their bodies in front of the mark, or photograph the high water line alone. This post explores the possible roles that the visual culture of post-disaster high water marks play, especially given the prevalence of the genre across disasters, geography, and time.
A telling discourse of hoarding emerged in the immediate aftermath of the storm from relief distribution hubs that collected and freely distributed food, clothing, and other material goods to those in need. In these cases, the concept of “hoarding” highlighted the differences–and politics–between equitable and equal distributions of goods.
“We were the first ones there. And not only were we the first; we were the best. You know? We were the first responders in areas that nobody knew about– like I went to Sheepshead Bay and Arlene Avenue. It’s strange because if you’re driving up and down it, you wouldn’t notice them. But there were maybe a couple of dozen small houses. Nobody else knew they were down there. Our sanitation guys knew where every little nook and cranny was.”
Discard Studies 