This short study analyzes the professional and political discussions of post-industrial and post-consumer waste, discards and recycling in state-socialist Hungary and connects these discourses with the changing cultures of waste, discards, and recycling around the globe.
If the disposability of menstrual products is not prioritised as much as their accessibility, India could be dealing with mountains of discarded waste products in less than 50 years.
Firsting in research, then, is not about being first to a place, first to know something, first to discover something. It is a proclamation of power to make property in someone’s home, to put your own name on otherwise shared or common knowledge. It’s a proclamation of the privilege to not see others, cite others, or acknowledge others.
The obsession that media has had with small businesses has hidden the most aggressive public health measures are missing the biggest driver of the pandemic: large industrial workplaces.
Though Nigeria approved a national solid waste management policy earlier this year, it does not provide a plan to include the large informal sector. An inclusive policy is one recognising and involving informal waste workers in solid waste management while also yielding improvements in their lives and waste management performance.
Put simply, evoking the universal “we” is a way to discard differences and maintain business as usual.
The field of discard studies is united by a critical framework that questions premises of what seems normal or given, what is valued and not valued, and the processes of devaluation and normalization. This includes the devaluation of workers and their labour. Discard studies is also a normative field, working to make systems of discard […]
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Development initiatives focused on menstrual health and sanitary pads in Southern countries actually disempower women as knowers and innovators.
Douglas’ theory of matter out of place is about power. Something in the wrong spot, something poisonous, is not matter out of place. Unless it threatens power.
For Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term, genocide was the effort to destroy a group as a group. #MMIWG
