Discard Studies is a young field of research that takes systems of waste and wasting as its topic of study, including but beyond conventional notions of trash and garbage. To keep practitioners up-to-date, Discard Studies publishes The Dirt, a monthly compilation of recent publications, positions, opportunities, and calls for proposals in the field. Here is […]
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When there’s conflict, academics and teachers will often put together a reading list or syllabus to show the breadth and depth of knowledge on a topic that is catching broad public attention. These reading lists are designed to add context, nuance, and history to public discussions (e.g. The Standing Rock Syllabus (2016); The Environmental Data […]
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Discard Studies is throwing a Twitter conference! Twitter conferences are accessible, create a permanent record of scholarship, support conversations with diverse audiences, and best of all, the presentations are short and planned in advance. Authors present their papers as threaded tweets, and audiences from around the world can read and comment from the comfort of […]
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We tend to think that we are familiar with waste because we deal with it every day. Yet, this is not the case–most aspects of waste are entirely hidden from view and understanding.
People tend to think that we are familiar with waste because we deal with it every day. Yet, this is not the case. Discard studies is central to thinking through and countering the initiative aspects of waste. As more popular, policy, activist, engineering and research attention is drawn to waste it becomes crucial for the humanities and social sciences to contextualize the problems, materialities and systems of waste that are not readily apparent to the invested but casual observer. Our task is to trouble the assumptions, premises and popular mythologies of waste so that work can go in a productive direction.
The Discard Studies Handybook. Max Liboiron, Robin Nagle, and Michele Acuto, eds. Through waste, we can see the world. Our practices, beliefs, rituals, and emotions around discarding shape our everyday actions. Municipal and industrial waste organizes people and work along lines of class, race, gender, age, and geography, making imbedded cultural norms and assumptions manifest. […]
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The newest addition to our syllabus collection is Mariana Mogilevich’s An Atlas of Urban Waste from New York University. The course introduction: From nineteenth-century neighborhoods built on landfill to the proliferation of parks on top of dumps today, waste defines the geography of the American city. Processes of consumption and destruction are at the heart of urban development. […]
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Two calls for papers and one workshop are all due March 1, and they all have something in common: the indeterminacy of waste and pollution, and the struggle to make the effects determinant. The CFP for the Canadian Association of Geographers states: “It seems impossible to definitively ascertain, calculate, or identify waste once and for all or always and everywhere.” The […]
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Many thanks to Caitlin DeSilvey at the University of Exeter in the UK for submitting her syllabus “Wastelands.” Wastelands is an upper level course taught via the geography department. The course, or module, description is as follows: “In this module, waste-making is approached as a dynamic cultural phenomenon that works to stabilize (and destabilize) social, spatial, […]
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Our friends at the Material World Blog have a new post about a special edition of Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture focused entirely on second hand clothing. In her book Recycling Reconsidered, Samantha MacBride discusses the “hidden” nature of discarded textiles, which “have quietly escalated as a fraction of municipal solid waste with […]
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