In the 1980s, when menstruation was generally considered taboo, artist Jay Critchley made art out of discarded plastic tampon applicators washed up and collected on local beaches. With no idea what the items were used for, Critchley could not have known that his curiosity would lead to a decades-long quest to understand and improve issues surrounding menstrual product waste.
Starting in the early fall of 2021, we are looking for a new Managing Editor to oversee and carry out regular operations of Discard Studies and to create a new vision for the platform.
It’s time for reminiscing! And what better topic to think back on than a year’s worth of trashy insights? Here are the top ten posts from Discard Studies in 2020 as determined by our readers!
The Discard Studies Twitter Conference is going live on November 16th and 17th! Here is the schedule. #Discard2020
What do we know about the relationships between waste and COVID-19? Some figures and insights are emerging, but given that we’re in the thick of the pandemic and the expressions of a global pandemic will still vary greatly by region, type of waste, and change over time, any knowledge will be both partial and early. […]
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Discard Studies is throwing a Twitter conference! Twitter conferences are accessible, create a permanent record of scholarship, support conversations with diverse audiences, and best of all, the presentations are short and planned in advance. Authors present their papers as threaded tweets, and audiences from around the world can read and comment from the comfort of […]
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Agbogbloshie is a part of an emergent globalised scrap economy that links peripheral markets to global metal flows. In this post, Dagna Rams argues for the need to pay closer attention to the flow of recuperated metals out of Agbogbloshie.
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.
While giving food that would otherwise go to landfill to hungry people may be a convenient part of a solution to reduce greenhouse gases, it will do little to ensure the well-being of the four million Canadians who are food insecure.
We decided to do something new this year at Discard Studies: we tracked the links our readers followed. With ‘The Dirt” coming out monthly with it’s hundreds of links to new articles, calls for papers, and opportunities, we wanted to see how readers were directing their attention and voting with their mouses. Mice? Never sure […]
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