“Eating Rotten Meat Does not Disgust them” 3-14-12

The Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at CUNY is sponsoring a talk by Tarek El-Ariss entitled, “Eating Rotten Meat Does not Disgust them” Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804-1886) on British Food and Civilization. This is a rare treat for discard studies scholars, since we often dwell on solid waste as the site of expulsion, […]
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CFP- Environments of Waste: Representation and Ecologies of Pollution

Panel for Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) Conference Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Sept 27-30, 2012 Working Description:: Environments of Waste: Representation and Ecologies of Pollution This panel aims to bring together interdisciplinary research, theory and art regarding garbage, waste, anti-landscapes, rubbish, junk, toxic discourse, pollution and external spaces. Waste as an entity has become […]
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Call for Submissions: Material World Occasional Paper Series

Material World is seeking submissions for our new Occasional Paper Series. In this we aim to make available works that are hard to publish in conventional academic environments because they are multi-media, long or short, reports, polemical, or otherwise exploratory, creative and innovative. Our Occasional Paper Series is fully peer-reviewed and is indexed by the […]
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Like garbage

Next month, the M.I.T. Press will release The Femicide Machine by Sergio González Rodríguez. Rodriguez is a social thinker and a passionate columnist for Reforma, a Mexican newspaper.  He has been investigating the rapes and deaths of hundreds of women and girls in Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez.  In the process he has uncovered a tangled web of […]
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How to Describe Tsunami Debris

Posted by Max Liboiron A recent post by Nancy Wallace, Director of the NOAA Marine Debris Program, lays out the simple facts of what we do and do not know about floating debris from Japan’s tsunami in the wake of often unfounded, always spectacular coverage by mainstream news. No, there will not be human remains. […]
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Mall-ed

As shopping malls replace independent stores across the globe at a dizzying pace, we should pause to consider a number of vexing critical thinking questions: What types of things can a person buy at the shopping mall these days?  What are the hidden webs of economic interdependencies that we find ourselves caught up in when […]
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Dumpster Diving for Digitial Waste

By Max Liboiron. That’s right, diving for digital waste, not e-waste. We are familiar with curbside scavengers and recycling programs for electronic hardware, but how do you dumpster dive all those deleted files, those 1’s and 0’s you drag to your desktop bin every day? What about upcylcing digital waste? This is where Dumpster Drive […]
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SCRAP

“From a recovered pillow to a gallery installation, from a home-made costume to classroom educational materials, creative reuse includes all projects that incorporate materials that would otherwise be thrown away. Folks who find materials at SCRAP are teachers, artists, crafters, and designers who transform what could have been discarded into something with new value.” From […]
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Visual Culture of Food Waste Data: Theaters of Proof

By Max Liboiron A lot of discard issues are about scale. Scale is expressed in functions of measurement or computation, yet scale is more than a quantitative sum. Scale is always relative (“bigger,” “smaller,” “less than,” “twice as much,” “a quarter of”), and therefore relational. So scale is not merely about being big or small. […]
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Seduction of the instantaneous

By Robin Nagle. There’s something to be said for deep engagement.  I agree with Wolfgang Iser, the literary theorist and co-founder of the sub-discipline of literary anthropology, who argued passionately that focused engagement with a text can truly transform the reader (see The Act of Reading).  Although Iser was mostly concerned with works of literature, his theory […]
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