Category Archives: Uncategorized

Debut Guest Post! Friedman’s “Washing Up”

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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Dirt Conference

Just in time for the holidays! This year’s New York Metropolitan Studies Association conference considers dirt: “What does it mean to call something dirty? How do we understand dirt and its opposite, cleanliness? How do we explain the points at which we draw the line between clean and dirty, what we embrace and what we […]
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That which was left behind does not a discard make.

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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“Chasing Sanitation”

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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