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.
Gulls. Pigeons. Rats. Lice. These ‘trash animals’ live alongside waste, filth, ruination and decay. Attitudes, behaviour and infrastructure aimed at dealing with ‘trash animals’ tell us a lot about systems of discarding. The following is a bibliography of ‘trash animals’ research.
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.
What does that mean? As an affront to order, it means we are pollution. It means we must be aggressively ignored, ordered, or erased. We know this. This is part of why so many of us have been grieving since Wednesday.
Refusal is a method whereby researchers and research participants together decide not to make particular information available for use within the academy. Here are some strategies for identifying and collaborating with research refusals.
Toxics: A Symposium on Exposure, Entanglement, and Endurance was heralded as “the most important conversation on body burdens yet.” See the Twitter version of that conversation here.
Food Not Bombs and endeavors like it, I would argue, also create the conditions to queer categories of embodiment like race, class, and sex and interrogate their privileged incorporation by prevailing markets, publics, and institutions, cultivating emergent spaces of embodiment, contact, and collaboration across difference.
Abjection describes a social and psychological process by which things like garbage, sewage, corpses and rotting food elicit powerful emotional responses like horror and disgust.
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.
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 