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. […]
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“It has generally been held that an in most instances rightly held that the degree of dilution necessary is merely that which will prevent a nuisance, having reference primarily to unsightly floating matter and bad odors. For most rivers and many of the smaller streams of the country, this requirement as to the cleanness of […]
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By Max Liboiron. I suspect, that like me, urban followers of the Discard Studies blog spend a lot of time looking down. There is a lot of interesting trash on sidewalks, roads, and gutters, and now there is a place to share your awareness with the world (provided you have a smart phone): Litterati, the […]
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In May, the IDEAS City festival hosted a panel on waste. A recording of the event, mysteriously retitled as World Waste: Recycling Cities and Saving the Planet, even though recycling was fairly trounced as a way to save the planet, is now available online. Be forewarned: you can’t fast forward to skip around within the […]
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Lindsey Dillon, of the University of California, Berkeley, has just published “Race, Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard” in the latest Antipode. Abstract:This paper advances the concept of “waste formations” as a way of thinking together processes of race, space, and waste in brownfield redevelopment projects. Defined as […]
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Guest post by Kim DeWolff via her blog Plasticized. On a sunny spring morning we walk the Arahama coast near Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku region that experienced the March 2011 tsunami. Two years and a few days later, yellowed grass stands in cracked concrete outlines of houses, bathroom tiles still recognizable. A […]
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By Zoltana Domotor, from If I was a Hoarder: On December 1, 2012 the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association approved the final diagnostic criteria for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, due to be published in May 2013. Among the diagnoses new to the fifth edition of the manual […]
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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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Once again, the AAG is rife with panels for the discard studies enthusiast. You can conceviably attend the entire week-long conference going to nothing but papers and panels on waste of one sort or another. Here is your guide to all things trashy at the conference in LA this April” Full Sessions: Producing Disease: Exposure, […]
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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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