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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We’ve mentioned Lisa Dowda and Liz Ligon before; they are the creative force behind Chasing Sanitation, a website about the lives and labors of New York City’s sanitation workers. This weekend they move beyond the web, into an exhibition opening Saturday in New York. Their work deserves a wide audience. Ligon’s photographs are lush and […]
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Thomas Rochon, president of Ithaca College in upstate New York, wrote this essay in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s a thoughtful rumination on his experiences working with the school’s maintenance and grounds crews. He spent only three days with them, but that’s a lot more than most (any?) other college […]
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It started because of injuries. About fifty years ago, a group of municipal solid waste management folks — that is, the men and women in charge of publicly- organized garbage collection and street cleaning — were having a lunch meeting when one of them mentioned that sanitation workers under his supervision were getting hurt when […]
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It’s a website, it’s a book-in-progress, it’s an extraordinary work about the men and women of New York’s Department of Sanitation. Lisa Dowda and Liz Ligon have spent two years hanging with, interviewing, photographing, and learning the ways and lives of the men and women who pick up the Big Apple. The images and stories […]
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Angelo Bruno was a sanitation worker with New York City’s Department of Sanitation for 31 years. He retired this past spring. He and his partner, Eddie Nieves, did a StoryCorps interview recently; this excellent excerpt was broadcast yesterday on NPR. I’m lucky enough to know both of them. Angelo was proud of his work and […]
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It’s a film by Lucy Walker, who chronicled the work of Braziian artist Vic Muniz as he collaborated with “catadores,” or scavengers, on a landfill in Rio de Janeiro. “Waste Land” won’t have national release until October, but it deserves wide attention.
I write this on a computer. When the computer is no longer in my life, where will it go? Without more rigorous e-waste recycling laws in the United States, it could find its way to this community in Ghana, profiled in a recent New York Times photo essay. The description that previews the photos mentions […]
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Discard Studies 