Category Archives: Waste

Bigger, Better, Faster, More? Breaking the taboo of production

“When recycling is framed as the solution to waste problems, as it so often is in the case of e-waste, both the problem and the solution are mismatched. Recycling post-consumer commodities will do nothing to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions (or any other wastes) arising during manufacturing, long before we purchase that which we will later throwaway or recycle.” Instead, we need to look at slowing production if we want to make an impact on electronic waste.

PhD position: Turning Livelihoods to Rubbish (Aug 20 deadline)

The University of Manchester Department of Geography is pleased to announce a PhD studentship for the research grant ‘Turning livelihoods to rubbish? Assessing the impacts of formalization and technologization of waste management on the urban poor’. This three year project focuses on politics of waste management and the urban poor in developing countries.

Funded MA & PhD positions in Participatory Citizen Science, Marine Plastics, and Action-based Research

We are spearheading an interdisciplinary project that looks at research methodologies and ethics in a permanently polluted world. We will be focusing on developing methodologies for participatory citizen science on marine plastics, where local experts such as fishermen and women are full collaborators who co-create research questions, collect data, analyse findings, and mobilize research.

Food Banks: Canned Justice or Fuel For activism?

By Aaron Vansintjan. How the food industry made waste ‘benevolent’. Food Banks: Canned Justice or Fuel For activism?

Criminal Negligence?

By Josh Lepawsky, Joshua Goldstein, and Yvan Schulz On 12 May 2015 the United Nations Environmental Program announced the release of a new report called Waste Crime – Waste Risks. Among the topics covered by the report is the global problem of discarded electronics or ‘e-waste’. After reading the report with a focus on the […]
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Bibliography on Space Trash & Orbital Debris

From tiny flakes of paint to defunct satellites, there is increasing attention to the space debris that orbits the Earth and exists on other planets. This bibliography provides a range of articles, interviews, and reports on the increasingly dire case of orbital debris.

Discard Studies at the Association of American Geographers Conference (April 2015)

This year the AAG’s annual meeting is in Chicago from April 21-25. The schedule shows that presentations on discard studies at an all time high.

Introduction to Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Rob Nixon’s book shows how the invisible, destructive impacts of neoliberalism stretch across vast spatial and temporal scales. Within this history, profits are internalized and risks exacerbated as they are offloaded on poor communities.

CFP: Geographies of waste: Space, scale and geopolitics (Due March 13)

In this panel, we seek to explore the geographies of waste locally and internationally. We seek to understand patterns of global and domestic governance of waste, broadly defined.

Queering Waste Through Camp

Like queer theory, discard studies is interested in uneven remainders, things that don’t fit neatly into categories. Both concern themselves with the strange and imperfect construction of divisions that do violence to humans, cultures, and environments, while still attending to the fact that these divisions have meaning for people, that they are strategic, and that they structure our thought in ways that are almost impossible to escape.