Article Alert- Dispossession by Accumulation
Antipode has published Tom Perreault’s “Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining, Water and the Nature of Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano.” The article is noteworthy not only because it discusses some of the objects of discard studies–namely, pollution– but also because it figures industrial discards as a form of accumulation. The accumulation in question is capitalistic primitive accumulation […]
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Garbage City
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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Trash is a Wicked Problem
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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Recycled Artist in Residency campaign coming to a close, but residencies to kick off in earnest
RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency) is a young yet accomplished project located within a construction waste recycling center in Philadelphia. They have twelve hours left in a fundraising campaign to open the trash-stream residency program to applications from artists in the Spring of 2013. They hope to hire staff with the money and become a […]
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Relics and ruins from our industrial past
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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Discard Studies and the Nonhuman
Guest post by Josh Lepawsky Have we students of discard studies given sufficient thought to the nonhuman? The nonhuman in the form of materiality and the agencies of things is certainly a prevalent theme in the multiplying and ramifying work constituting discard studies. But there is, of course, more to the nonhuman than ‘stuff’ and […]
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Waste and Capitalism
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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Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement: A Photo Essay
By Max Liboiron It has been one week since the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, September 17, 2012. In celebration, let’s look at the movement through the lens of discard studies. My article, “Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement“, has just appeared in Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, […]
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Recycling as a Crisis of Meaning
This article was originally published by Max Liboiron in eTOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Spring 2010. In laymen’s terms, recycling is “good for the environment.” It involves “doing your bit” to help “save the Earth.” Yet recycling requires high expenditures of energy and virgin materials, and produces pollutants, greenhouse gases and waste; it creates […]
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George Constanza defines a “bum”
Here’s a tidbit from Scarlett Lindeman’s recent article in Gastronomica (reproduced in the Sept/Oct issue of the Utne Reader). She takes this fragment of dialogue from the Seinfield Show in 1994 (The Gymnast episode). Jerry sees that George has pulled an eclair out of the garbage dumpster: Jerry: But it was in the cylinder. George: Above […]
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Discard Studies 