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.

Abjection: A definition for discard studies

Abjection describes a social and psychological process by which things like garbage, sewage, corpses and rotting food elicit powerful emotional responses like horror and disgust.

Event: Producing Waste/Producing Space (3/6-7, Princeton University)

Through a series of interrelated programs, Producing Waste/Producing Space seeks to locate points of intersection between the study of waste and strategies for waste in space.

The Chinese Logistical Sublime and Its Wasted Remains

Originally posted on The Disorder Of Things:
Sent from Taipei, the penultimate post in a container ship ethnography. More here. ? An APL vessel heads out of the port of Hong Kong On our thirteenth day at sea, after having been battered by 6 meter waves and snow, gale-force winds and storm, having watched the ship’s…

CFP: “Faking It:” Counterfeits, Copies, and Uncertain Truths in Science, Technology, and Medicine

We invite colleagues to join us for a two day symposium at the University of California, Berkeley on “faking it”–here construed broadly as fudging, imitating, juking, playing the trickster, pretending, feigning, re-creating, manipulating, falsifying.

CFP: Special issue on Depollution

In a forthcoming special issue, S.A.P.I.EN.S will publish a range of articles that review recent advances at the frontiers of pollution and depollution of air, water and soil, with a particular focus on cities and brownfield regeneration.

Map of 40 most influential environmental justice conflicts in the US

The 40 most influential environmental justice conflicts in recent American history are now included in a Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. In the United States, decades of research have documented a strong correlation between the location of environmental burdens and the racial/ethnic background of the most impacted residents.

Students create concept models for Giant Mine markers: Communicating contamination in perpetuity

By Arn Keeling “Project Dystopia,” “The Information Tomb” and the “Giant Facility for Environmental Hazards” were among the conceptual models developed for markers and warning systems at Yellowknife’s Giant Mine by a class of cultural geography students at Memorial University. The abandoned Giant Mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories is the location of 237,000 tonnes of […]
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A Methodology for Investigating Cityness through Waste

How do you study cityness through waste? Cityness has been used to describe both “how urban citizens give meaning to the city they live in and how this creation of meaning alters the way the city is represented” and as “an instrument to capture something that otherwise might easily get lost: types of urbanity that are non-Western.”