By Max Liboiron. “When I got to get the stuff in the bucket, first I go down the far left edge of the pile, dump it in. Then I go down the far right side of the pile, dump it in. Then I go down the middle. So everything fits in the back of the […]
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AAA 2013, Volunteered Session Proposal Title: Beyond purity and pollution? Hygiene, cleanliness, and urban futures. Organizers: Anna Boermel (King’s College London), Jamie Furniss (University of Edinburgh) This panel asks what role notions of hygiene, cleanliness and order have today in figurations and representations of urban futures, and the real and painful struggles of cities and […]
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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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Our friends at the Material World Blog have a new post about a special edition of Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture focused entirely on second hand clothing. In her book Recycling Reconsidered, Samantha MacBride discusses the “hidden” nature of discarded textiles, which “have quietly escalated as a fraction of municipal solid waste with […]
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Call for Proposals: Waste Trash, garbage, junk, refuse, pollution, waste. Sanitation work, environmental justice, freecycle, reuse. Our excesses can provide logistical challenges, practical opportunities, and great insight into individuals, communities and cultures. Anthropology News seeks proposals that may include, but are not limited to, explorations of waste in terms of: garbage, pollution, recycling, public health, […]
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If we are what we throw away, then what we throw away is worth a close look. Join Gelf on Monday, February 20, at 7:30 pm at The Gallery at LPR for Geeky Garbage, a look at that most overlooked aspect of the overlooked—civilization’s waste. We’ll have on hand the New York City sanitation department’s […]
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Joshua Reno has a new article in Science, Technology and Human Values entitled, “Managing the Experience of Evidence: England’s Experimental Waste Technologies and their Immodest Witnesses” Abstract: This article explores the technoenvironmental politics associated with government-sponsored climate change mitigation. It focuses on England’s New Technologies Demonstrator Programme, established to test the “viability” of “green” waste […]
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The Journal of Material Culture has a new article, “Souvenir salvage and the death of great naval ships,” by Nicky Gregson, Mike Crang, and Helen Watkins. Abstract This article re-orientates work on the material culture of war by considering military material culture beyond conflict and demonstrating how military material culture has extended social lives and passes through […]
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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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This is a quick post to share two remarkable photo essays. One looks at North Brother Island, while the second considers Admiral’s Row. Both are long-abandoned spaces in New York City. The images bring to mind Tim Edensor‘s work about how meanings are imagined, inscribed, forgotten, rewritten, and reclaimed in such haunted places. (Edensor’s themes […]
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