The petri dish was made for separation. As part of its ability to make separations between the contaminated world outside and the uncontaminated world inside, the dish also assisted in separating individuals from disease. These days, it’s getting harder for petri dishes to maintain these separations.
“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.”
In acknowledgement of growing literature and projects on mining waste, and the extreme longevity and toxicity of their legacies, here is a grant opportunity for people working in those areas:
By Max Liboiron, Lindsey Dillon, and submitting authors. Since at least the publication of Silent Spring, scientists, policy-makers, and the general public has focused on pollution in the environment as the object of regulation and control, a source of fear and anxiety, and the subject of scientific testing. As technologies, analytical detection limits, and eco-populist, […]
Read More »
Discard Studies has created a new resource page for dissertations and thesis related to the field. The partial review below is taken from Dissertation Reviews, a relatively new online publishing venue for freshly minted research (we highly recommend new graduates submit their work). If you would like your or your advisee’s dissertation on the Discard […]
Read More »
By Max Liboiron. You’ve probably heard of “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “The Gyre,” or other names given to the phenomenon of ocean plastics. You may have asked yourself why we just don’t clean it all up with a giant sea-vacuum. You may have even seen inventions meant to do just that. But perhaps […]
Read More »
The newly published edited collection Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic explores the material politics of plastics. From food packaging to credit cards, plastic facilitates every part of our daily lives, and stars a central role in discard debates. Universalised and abstracted, it is often treated as the passive object of political deliberations, or a […]
Read More »
Contagion, or the way disease, disgust and dirt circulates, how the effects of dirt transfer to bodies, and how harm is conceptualized, is central to discard studies. From miasma, through the germ theory of disease, and now for chronic, pervasive models of pollution brought about by endocrine distributors and radiation, theories of contagion have been […]
Read More »
By Max Liboiron. Measurements are never mere faithful representations of nature, but have social and political origins and ramifications. In representational theory, measurement is “the correlation of numbers with entities that are not numbers,” a process of transformation, translation, and even interpretation at the level of sampling and gathering data. What is selected for measurement and what is […]
Read More »
By Zoltana Domotor, from If I was a Hoarder: On December 1, 2012 the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association approved the final diagnostic criteria for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, due to be published in May 2013. Among the diagnoses new to the fifth edition of the manual […]
Read More »
Discard Studies 