This paper examines the politics of open defecation by focusing on everyday intersections of the body and infrastructure in the metabolic city, which produces profoundly unequal opportunities for fulfilling bodily needs. Specifically, it examines how open defecation emerges in Mumbai’s informal settlements through everyday embodied experiences, practices and perceptions forged in relation to the materialities of informality and infrastructure.
Why call this sub-genre of research into waste “discard studies?” Why not call it “waste studies?” This is a question that comes up a lot. It’s a question Robin Nagle, who coined the term, and I have spoken about at length.
What is it about our present—what forces, what infrastructures of global capital, conditions of planetary climate change, non-innocent affective economics—that provokes so many scholars to find the unformed phenomena, the phenomena open to change and already altered, everywhere?
Picking up discarded items from the curb can be tricky, even in a city as practiced as New York. Who wants to risk hauling a TV down three blocks and up four flights of stairs to find out it doesn’t work? Or what if that nice side table has bedbugs? Luckily, artist Sarah Nicole Phillips […]
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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 […]
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Today I came across a phrase that arrested the flow of my otherwise typical Thursday. A new PhD program in Germany called “Environment and Society” (more details here), a collaboration between Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität-München and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, describes how its interdisciplinary focus will allow students to explore questions related to “the […]
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Here is a post on Journal Square by Eric Friedman. He illustrates how places can become discards. Eric focuses on the phenomenology of place in his ongoing ethnography of Jersey City’s central square.
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 […]
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Only a thin and littered strip of beach shows at high tide. At first it seems an unremarkable slice of forgotten sand, nondescript, sloping gently down from the bank of shrubs and grasses and low trees that stands behind it. But countless shards of deep blue glass and rings of bone worn to the color […]
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Only a thin and littered strip of beach shows at high tide. At first it seems an unremarkable slice of forgotten sand, nondescript, sloping gently down from the bank of shrubs and grasses and low trees that stands behind it. But countless shards of deep blue glass and rings of bone worn to the color […]
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Discard Studies 