January 16, 2013 6:30 – 8:15pm 199 Lafayette Street, Third Floor New York City Just past Spring at Kenmare—and upstairs from La Esquina! A choreographer finds beauty and grace in garbage trucks and, against the odds, rallies reluctant city trash collectors to perform an extraordinary dance spectacle. On an abandoned airport runway, two dozen sanitation workers—and their […]
Read More »
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, […]
Read More »
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 […]
Read More »
By Max Liboiron Sewers are the most expensive and expansive urban infrastructures in North America. They are underground. They are made of inflexible pipes.They are difficult to access. And increasingly unpredictable acts of nature, from earthquakes to climate disruption, are making the probability of their spectacular, large-scale failure something to take note of. A couple […]
Read More »
By Max Liboiron Occupy Wall Street, and specifically representatives of the People’s Library, are suing New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg, its police commissioner Ray Kelly, the Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty, and other City officials in the seizure and discard of 2,798 books during the raid on Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011. If you are […]
Read More »
Tuesday, March 22, marked the tenth anniversary of the closing of Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island (this piece from the New York Times describes the day the landfill closed). Its transformation into a park is well under way, but the scale of the project — 2200 acres across four massive hills — means that […]
Read More »
The Wellcome Collection in London, part of the Wellcome Trust, opens an exhibit this Thursday, March 24, that explores changing attitudes toward dirt and cleanliness from the seventeenth century to the mid-21st. The show is built around specific examples in six different places — Delft, London, Glasgow, Dresden, New Delhi, and New York. It runs […]
Read More »
Material for the Arts in New York has been an inspiration and catalyst for creative reuse across more than three decades. A collaboration between the city’s Departments of Cultural Affairs and Sanitation,* MFTA connects unwanted stuff with eager arts and education organizations. Under the savvy leadership of Harriet Taub, objects that would otherwise become part […]
Read More »
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 […]
Read More »
I extend a warm welcome to Eric Friedman, Discard Studies’ newest contributor. A sociologist, Friedman’s work focuses on the forces behind urban decay, renewal, and stasis. The example he explores in most depth concerns Journal Square, the formerly vibrant commercial and cultural hub of Jersey City, NJ, that is now a desolate place scarred by […]
Read More »
Discard Studies 