CFP: Ephemera Society of America Conference

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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CFP: The Material of American Studies

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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Humans: Inherently wasteful, or good stewards? (And, why this question misses the point)

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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Materials Flows in Cities: A Talk by Samantha MacBride

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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Discarded Architecture, Intentions, Pasts

This is a quick post to share two remarkable photo essays. One looks at North Brother Island, while the second considers Admiral’s Row. Both are long-abandoned spaces in New York City. The images bring to mind Tim Edensor‘s work about how meanings are imagined, inscribed, forgotten, rewritten, and reclaimed in such haunted places. (Edensor’s themes […]
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A Question of Focus?

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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Discard Politics: How to Hijack a Moment of Hope

Tuesday, March 22, marked the tenth anniversary of the closing of Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island (this piece from the New York Times describes the day the landfill closed). Its transformation into a park is well under way, but the scale of the project — 2200 acres across four massive hills — means that […]
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Journal Square, Old and New

What happened to Journal Square?  Once known as a lively hub of cultural and political activity in the heart of Jersey City, NJ, Journal Square experienced what Hutchison (1992) once called the ““the almost incomprehensible…process of spatial restructuring” that effectively decentralized many central cities’ populations and economic activities to the suburbs during the second half of the twentieth […]
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Geological Garbage

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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Public Service Announcements for Trash Foragers

Picking up discarded items from the curb can be tricky, even in a city as practiced as New York. Who wants to risk hauling a TV down three blocks and up four flights of stairs to find out it doesn’t work? Or what if that nice side table has bedbugs? Luckily, artist Sarah Nicole Phillips […]
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