Guest post by Kim DeWolff via her blog Plasticized. On a sunny spring morning we walk the Arahama coast near Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku region that experienced the March 2011 tsunami. Two years and a few days later, yellowed grass stands in cracked concrete outlines of houses, bathroom tiles still recognizable. A […]
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By Max Liboiron. One of the central tensions in discard studies is the othering and externalizing of waste that originates in often intimate and everyday spaces and processes. This tension is maintained via material infrastructure (see, for example, Jennifer Clapp’s “The Distancing of Waste” or Coverly’s “Hidden Mountain“) and social), taboo (see Douglas’ Purity and Danger, or Inglis’ […]
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By Max Liboiron. An international group of scientists, including the young Chelsea Rochman and Mark Anthony Browne from California, with the support of the veteran marine scientist Richard Thompson from the UK and a host of others from the USA and Japan, has called on policy-makers to classify plastic waste as hazardous waste. Their argument, published in the latest issue of […]
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By Max Liboiron. As Samantha MacBride notes, modern waste–that is, postindustrial waste and particularly waste developed after 1945 when consumerism came into full swing in the United States– is synthetic, unpredictable, and heterogenous. Additionally, it has unique spatial and temporal characteristics compared to its predecessors. First, longevity: I’ve written elsewhere about the staggering longevity of plastics; […]
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By Max Liboiron. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers released their report on Global Food trends in anticipation of massive human population growth in the next 50 years. The trend that mattered most was the acute waste of nearly half the global food supply: Today, we produce about four billion metric tonnes of food per annum. […]
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Reblogged from our friends at the fantastic Material World Blog. Aliine Lotman (Anthro Dept, EHI, Tallinn University) “Until the 19th century, the term ‘to consume’ was used mainly in its negative connotations of ‘destruction’ and ‘waste’. Tuberculosis was known as ‘consumption’, that is, a wasting disease. Then economists came up with a bizarre theory, which […]
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Royal Geographical Society/ Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference 2013 London August 28-30, 2013 Organiser: Deljana Iossifova, University of Manchester This session aims to bring together research related to one of the most perturbing issues for growing and developing cities of the Global South and their existing and future residents: attitudes toward excretion. Excretion-related […]
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Edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, has many entries on waste. Perhaps this is not surprising, since many of what Samantha MacBride calls “modern wastes,” characterized by their synthetic nature, unpredictability, and heterogeneity, are also permanent. From plastics to e-waste, industrially-generated waste now lasts in geological time rather than evolutionary […]
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Many thanks to Caitlin DeSilvey at the University of Exeter in the UK for submitting her syllabus “Wastelands.” Wastelands is an upper level course taught via the geography department. The course, or module, description is as follows: “In this module, waste-making is approached as a dynamic cultural phenomenon that works to stabilize (and destabilize) social, spatial, […]
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January 16, 2013 6:30 – 8:15pm 199 Lafayette Street, Third Floor New York City Just past Spring at Kenmare—and upstairs from La Esquina! A choreographer finds beauty and grace in garbage trucks and, against the odds, rallies reluctant city trash collectors to perform an extraordinary dance spectacle. On an abandoned airport runway, two dozen sanitation workers—and their […]
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Discard Studies 