Discard studies are often entwined with landscapes. Ruins, environmental contamination, xenogarbology (the study of trash in space), ocean plastics, global e-waste flows, and urban waste are all place or space contingent. Thus, reading landscapes can be a valuable methodology for us. A fantastic example is the landscape ethnography Beyond Passaic: Contamination, security threats, hobo encampments. A […]
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Guest post by Mathew Lippincott. Originally posted on Mediashift’s Idea Lab. Detritivores are creatures that consume decaying matter. Detritivore designs use abundant waste products to make scalable technology solutions. Unlike loftier concepts of zero-waste design such as Cradle to Cradle, Detritivore design accepts that the world is already loaded with discarded and broken technology. Detritivore designers need […]
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A new article in Science, Technology and Human Values brings up an issue that has been at the forefront of waste studies for several centuries: the relationships between technology, trust, taboo, sewage, and potable water. Kerri Jean Ormerod and Christopher A. Scott‘s “Drinking Wastewater: Public Trust in Potable Reuse,” is a short, focused piece on […]
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Lindsey Dillon, of the University of California, Berkeley, has just published “Race, Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard” in the latest Antipode. Abstract:This paper advances the concept of “waste formations” as a way of thinking together processes of race, space, and waste in brownfield redevelopment projects. Defined as […]
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Postgraduate Workshop & Conference: Media Archaeology and Technological Debris Thursday, June 20 – Friday, June 21, 2013, Goldsmiths, University of London This workshop aims to bring academics and PhD students together to discuss emerging research projects on the field of media studies. It means to combine the thriving approach of media archaeology with the growing […]
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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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4S Conference October 9 – 12, 2013 San Diego, California Exploring the question of how to make environmental health hazards perceptible, we invite participation in an interdisciplinary hands-on, half-day workshop on emerging methods for environmental monitoring in science and technology studies. In particular we highlight methods that engage with critical making through art, design, and […]
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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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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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