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.
“I found that people compare themselves with and against each other regarding values and norms associated with news and responsible citizenship, and that these comparisons have implications for their sense of belonging within civil society. …[D]emonstrations of discontent provide an opportunity for people to enhance their sense of self and see themselves as legitimate members of civil society. They ‘become’ pure.”
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, […]
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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.
“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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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, anti-toxic movements have developed over the decades, scrutiny […]
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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 […]
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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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