A Black and Decker toaster oven, a pre-amplifier (and its sister amplifier), an electric hot water boiler for tea, and a monitor from an older computer — these are just some of the electronics and small appliances that have moved from inside of my home to the staging area known as the garage, to the […]
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By Max Liboiron. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers released their report on Global Food trends in anticipation of massive human population growth in the next 50 years. The trend that mattered most was the acute waste of nearly half the global food supply: Today, we produce about four billion metric tonnes of food per annum. […]
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Royal Geographical Society/ Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference 2013 London August 28-30, 2013 Organiser: Deljana Iossifova, University of Manchester This session aims to bring together research related to one of the most perturbing issues for growing and developing cities of the Global South and their existing and future residents: attitudes toward excretion. Excretion-related […]
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Edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, has many entries on waste. Perhaps this is not surprising, since many of what Samantha MacBride calls “modern wastes,” characterized by their synthetic nature, unpredictability, and heterogeneity, are also permanent. From plastics to e-waste, industrially-generated waste now lasts in geological time rather than evolutionary […]
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Many thanks to Caitlin DeSilvey at the University of Exeter in the UK for submitting her syllabus “Wastelands.” Wastelands is an upper level course taught via the geography department. The course, or module, description is as follows: “In this module, waste-making is approached as a dynamic cultural phenomenon that works to stabilize (and destabilize) social, spatial, […]
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While we often post article alerts about new scholarship on garbage matters, I wanted to take a moment to re-visit Ellen Handy’s 1995 essay, “Dust Piles and Damp Pavements: Excrement, Repression, and the Victorian City in Photography and Literature.” First of all, thank you Ellen Handy for introducing readers to Thomas Annan’s enduring work (see “Dust […]
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This is Dutch photographer Bas Princen’s staggering panorama of the Zabaleen settlement in Cairo, Egypt’s capital. These residents, living in an area known as garbage city, store, sort and recycle trash to earn their living. The photograph was included in the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and an exhibition at Storefront Art and Architecture in New […]
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By Max Liboiron One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Waste is inherently ambivalent. It is both worthless and the basis for a billion dollar, recession-proof industry, complete with cartels and multinational companies. Disgust with filth both reaffirms our identities and troubles us. But a plethora of contradictory terms and values is not what makes […]
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Yes, that’s a painting! Long ago (and on into today), explorers and anthropologists sought to capture images of the disappearing worlds they found. Similarly, Artist Valeri Larko memorializes (on canvas) the ruins and structures of the everyday disappearing urban/industrial landscapes around her. Her bio records that she is “best known for her densely painted landscapes of […]
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Last night’s presentation of Surveying Waste and Capital at Trade School (NYC), lead by CUNY doctoral candidate Jesse Goldstein included a historical narrative starting in England during the enclosure movement and how the “wasteland,” originally referring to productive pasture and foraging land on the outskirts of a village’s agricultural fields, was reframed as “wasted spaces” […]
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Discard Studies 