On Nov. 17 and 18 the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) and the Hagley Museum and Library will sponsor the conference, “The Life of New Materials.” Conference sessions will explore the ways in which the development, use, and re-use of new materials is an embedded feature of our industrial society. The conference takes the biographies of […]
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The Artichoke Dance Company choreographs and performs a number of pieces about ocean plastics and waste. They are performing “Your Planet: The Human Mapping Project” this weekend, where seven dancers dressed in crocheted six-pack holders chart the journey trash takes as it leaves land sources and makes its way out to sea. Audience members will […]
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Archeologist Jason De Leon uses discards left through undocumented migration on the US/Mexico border to narrate the social, political, and geographical elements of one of the world’s largest ongoing modern-day migrations. The University of Washington has published a full length article about his work. In a small, cluttered office in Denny Hall, De Leon is […]
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Geography is a science of earthly lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena. Waste and discards shape, are shaped by, and re/disappear in these landscapes, and it would seem that geography has taken notice. In the upcoming American Association of Geographer‘s Conference in New York this February (24-28th), there are no less than three separate panels planned […]
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The Material World Blog has a post on two new books that may be of interest to our readers. The first is Paraphernalia by Steven Connor (London: Profile Books 2011): The delight of Paraphernalia is it is really a kind of literary equivalent of tipping out a person’s handbag or the back of their desk […]
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“Imagine coherence without consistency.” — John Law, After Method. If you start reading discard studies, you’ll come across the adage “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” in short order. This is more than a cliché: there is something about discards that is inherently contested, multiple and fragmented. Thus, discard scholars need methodologies that don’t […]
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Our dominant waste management practices are decidedly utopic, takings the “no place” of utopia’s etymology quite literally. To create a “good place” of clean, disease-free municipalities, trash is exiled to “no place,” an ideal “away” that effects and troubles no one (except, as course, as environmental justice advocates tell us, someone– usually someones who are poor and part of minority communities– lives in “no place “).
I recently watched a TV episode with The Garbage Collector, the anti-hero in an “environmental slasher film.” The Garbage Collector was a monstrous figure who lived in a landfill and seemed to battle bad guys even though it wasn’t clear whether he was a bad guy or good guy himself. This ambiguity seems to be […]
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On June 21st around one hundred scholars and activists working in the humanities and social sciences (plus one scientist) converged at Goldsmiths College in London to talk plastic. Usually symposia on plastic are part of science, industry, the trades or environmental studies. Accumulation is the first of its kind. “The purpose of this interdisciplinary workshop […]
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The Wellcome Collection’s exhibition Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life (March 24 – August 31, 2011) in London is a smorgasbord of over 200 fantastic dirt-related artifacts. Passerbys will find something interesting, disgusting, or odd to contemplate, and connoisseurs and scholars of dirt will find new tid bits to add to their repertoires and […]
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Discard Studies 