Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice Edited by Stephanie Foote and Elizabeth Mazzolini Coming October 2012 from MIT Press. [From MIT website:] “Garbage, considered both materially and culturally, elicits mixed responses. Our responsibility toward the objects we love and then discard is entangled with our responsibility toward the systems that make those […]
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One of our readers, Nils Johansson, a PhD student at Linköping University, Sweden, has a new co-authored article in the Journal of Cleaner Production on the technosphere (the part of the physical environment affected through building or modification by humans). They remind us that the technosphere includes waste, discards, and the circulation of precious materials […]
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A new series on The Thread Radio has a new series on storage, a topic near and dear to discard researcher’s heart, as it is both the opposite of discarding (archiving) but also its corollary, as discards must be stored. We’ve probably all stated more than once “there is no ‘away.’” So it is no […]
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Opportunities for Graduate Study Josh Lepawsky, Department of Geography, Memorial University is seeking Masters and PhD students to contribute to a SSHRC funded project researching the prospects and challenges of fair/ethical trade in rubbish electronics and recycling, starting in Fall 2012. Successful candidates will have a strong background in one or more of cultural, economic, […]
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Presence/absence, boundaries/excess, marked/unmarked and natural/postnatural are some of the comparative analytical frames discard studies frequently use. A new article in the Journal of Material Culture on natural burial, “Landscapes of the dead? Natural burial and the materialization of absence,” uses these frames in investigate burial practices. Abstract This article questions the emphasis on presence within […]
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Terra Economica: Waste and the Production of Enclosed Nature Jesse Goldstein Antipode Abstract: This essay provides an analysis of the “dirty” history and geography of enclosure, as both an instance of primitive accumulation and a production of nature. Specifically, I reconsider the English enclosures as a struggle over the land-use designation of “waste”. Whereas both […]
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Artist Christina Freeman began her MFA thesis project, Plums for Trash, by taking a suitcase full of odds and ends she didn’t need from New York City to outdoor markets throughout Sofia, Bulgaria. She traded her objects in these markets, often for objects that had been pulled out of the waste stream. She made this […]
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One of the joys of being a discard scholar is that our objects of study can be so insistent they challenge disciplinary methodologies. In an earlier post, I wrote that because trash is “inherently contested, multiple and fragmented… discard scholars need methodologies that don’t tidy up the mess and make trash one kind of stable, […]
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The latest edition of the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers contains an article by Mike Crang, Alex Hughes, Nicky Gregson, Lucy Norris and Farid Ahamed entitled, “Rethinking governance and value in commodity chains through global recycling networks.” Abstract: The dominant political-economic approaches to global trade flows known as global value chains and global production networks offer powerful insights into the coordination […]
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The newest edition of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographerscontains an article by Craig Young and Duncan Light entitled, “Corpses, dead body politics and agency in human geography: following the corpse of Dr Petru Groza.” Abstract: This paper follows the mobilities between 1958 and 1990 of the dead body of Dr Petru Groza (1884–1958), […]
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