On June 21st around one hundred scholars and activists working in the humanities and social sciences (plus one scientist) converged at Goldsmiths College in London to talk plastic. Usually symposia on plastic are part of science, industry, the trades or environmental studies. Accumulation is the first of its kind. “The purpose of this interdisciplinary workshop […]
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The Wellcome Collection’s exhibition Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life (March 24 – August 31, 2011) in London is a smorgasbord of over 200 fantastic dirt-related artifacts. Passerbys will find something interesting, disgusting, or odd to contemplate, and connoisseurs and scholars of dirt will find new tid bits to add to their repertoires and […]
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The Ephemera Society of America (ESA) holds an annual three-day conference in Old Greenwich, Ct. in March devoted to sharing and exploring various aspects of ephemera. The first day is devoted to presentations of papers around a specific theme and to exhibits and member forums. This is followed by a two-day ephemera trade fair with […]
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Australasian Journal of American Studies Call for Papers “The Materials of American Studies,” December 2012. Bill Brown observes that by the end of the nineteenth century, “the invention, production, distribution and consumption of things rather suddenly came to define a national culture” [Sense of Things 4]. This issue of the Australasian Journal of American Studies, […]
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People are making more waste than ever before. The desire to luxuriate and waste is part of human nature. Humans are inherently wasteful. We’ve heard it before. But I doubt it. So I did an experiment: Rubbish Topographies is a landscape made of donated trash. Although the pile of tea bags and cardboard may bring to […]
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Wednesday, May 11 • 12:00 to 2:00 • 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor • New York City Samantha MacBride has written eloquently and in-depth about the networks and relationships that keep an international flow of materials moving across the globe, particularly as these pertain to waste. In this talk, she focuses on the connection between […]
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On April 7, the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a panel discussion called “Trash Talk: Options for Converting Our Solid Waste to Energy.” Nickolas Themelis of the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University spoke about the many benefits of waste-to-energy, or WTE technologies. David Demme, with a company called SAIC Energy, Environment & Infrastructure, […]
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Verlyn Klinkenborg’s recent article, “After the Great Quake, Living with Earth’s Uncertainty” is about how the earthquake and tsunami in Japan “remind us that we exist in geologic time.” He links the earthquake and its aftermath with climate change, saying, “[a]s we watch the specter of climate change unfold — trying to grasp the shifting, […]
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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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Elextrolux has commodified, beautified, and publicized one of the worst pollution dilemmas of the century. Last Fall they unveiled “Vacs from the Sea,” a series of vacuum cleaners made from ocean plastics. Each vac uses plastic from one of five global gyre locations collected in collaboration with environmental groups. The North Sea edition, for example, […]
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Discard Studies 