Category Archives: Justice (EJ)

Chennai Waste, Part 2: The rural urban divide and caste politics

While most of my middle class informants have shied away from discussing caste, and instead point to class as being more of a social indicator in Chennai nowadays, Elango is insistent that “development and economics are masking the social, caste system.” Urbanization is just a process; caste is a system, a way of life so deeply entrenched that it has become taken for granted. This caste system entrenchment has in turn translated into not only a lack of empathy, but a sense that certain people belong or deserve certain tasks, such as clearing garbage, or waste picking. Elango’s words reminded me of a Ramky Group (a private company in charge of waste disposal for a few Chennai zones) street sweeper in Mylapore with whom I spoke in April, who echoed this idea that people don’t stop to think that someone is coming behind them to clean up the garbage they throw on the streets.

Twenty-first century nuisance law and the continued entanglement of race, gender, property, and violence

“It has generally been held that an in most instances rightly held that the degree of dilution necessary is merely that which will prevent a nuisance, having reference primarily to unsightly floating matter and bad odors. For most rivers and many of the smaller streams of the country, this requirement as to the cleanness of […]
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Detritus from Historic Deadhorse Bay: Trash Meant to be Left Behind

By Max Liboiron A long, long time ago, a younger, grubbier New York City dumped its trash on Barren Island off the south shores of Brooklyn. Barren Island was its own self-contained community and had a one-room school house, four saloons, and five factories boiling garbage all day, everyday. The buildings and island inhabitants–mostly immigrant […]
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Cooper Union Student Protest: Cleaning Up their School

By Max Liboiron. Around one hundred Cooper Union students are in the third day of occupying the office of their president. The protest comes after a vastly unpopular decision by their board of trustees, lead by school president Bharucha, to end their more than 100 year tradition of a tuition-free school. They are fighting against an […]
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Race, Class, and Disaster Gentrification

By Zoltán Glück Originally published in Tidal on March 13, 2013 In the days and weeks following Hurricane Sandy the inequalities at the heart of New York City could scarcely be missed.  While hundreds of thousands of public housing residents went without heat, hot water or electricity, Mayor Michael Bloomberg rushed to get the stock […]
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New York City settles with Occupy Wall Street for unconstitutional trashing

By Max Liboiron. Nearly a year ago, I posted about a lawsuit brought against the City of New York by the People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street for trashing thousands of books during the eviction of Zuccoti Park. The story resonated with a lot of people because the destruction of books is seen as a special type of waste […]
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Article Alert- Dispossession by Accumulation

Antipode has published Tom Perreault’s “Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining, Water and the Nature of Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano.” The article is noteworthy not only because it discusses some of the objects of discard studies–namely, pollution– but also because it figures industrial discards as a form of accumulation. The accumulation in question is capitalistic primitive accumulation […]
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Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement: A Photo Essay

By Max Liboiron It has been one week since the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, September 17, 2012. In celebration, let’s look at the movement through the lens of discard studies. My article, “Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement“, has just appeared in Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, […]
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Article Alert-Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement

Currently “Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement” is published as a forthcoming article in Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, but will soon be part of a special issue on the Occupy movement. From August until September, the special issue will have free and open access. When […]
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