Organised by the International Food Waste and Food Loss Studies Group, this AAG session will: 1) Provide a forum for food waste scholars to share their work, and…
This session picks up on work that posits an understanding of waste as emergent, or as co-emerging alongside certain configurations of governance.
Landfills partake of multiple temporal scales, making them difficult to regulate and run. Taking into account multiple timescapes, or polychronicity, reveals the constitutive role of non-human beings …
Ecological science, invited as queer tactic, can transfigure political ecology’s relations to and interchanges within the Anthropocene. Political ecology shares with queer theory an interest in the bo…
The leveraging of the temporal lag between the developed and the developing world by these local street vendors enables them to generate additional value from the discarded. Second-hand…
Drawing from long-term ethnographic research on a 25-year-old medical aid program linking the U.S. and Madagascar, I use this brief essay to trace how Malagasy and American participants…
Food Not Bombs and endeavors like it, I would argue, also create the conditions to queer categories of embodiment like race, class, and sex and interrogate their privileged…
As the excesses, effluents, and excreta of larger social spheres are discarded, discounted, and possibly denigrated, what happens at those margins where they recirculate? What fissures in prevailing…
The global economy produces pervasive contaminants, harmful pollutants, damaging particles, and poisonous atmospheres, which are inescapably part of everyday life, though the harms and benefits are un…
Discard studies is about more than discarded, wasted, unsaved, and externalized objects. It also includes people.
When our library at Occupy Wall Street was destroyed, we used our beloved books tactically, as evidence, and then used the trauma of destruction to make a case…
The University of Manchester Department of Geography is pleased to announce a PhD studentship for the research grant ‘Turning livelihoods to rubbish? Assessing the impacts of formalization and…
Even if Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger is the keystone text of Discard Studies, there are few scholars who work to extend, nuance, or contest the theory that…
The 2nd Annual Students for Zero Waste Conference will be held October 9th-10th at the University of New Hampshire campus. It’s a great opportunity for student activists and…
Canada’s Waste Network has just launched! It aims to connect social science and humanities researchers interested in Canadian waste issues. Join now!
By Aaron Vansintjan. How the food industry made waste ‘benevolent’. Food Banks: Canned Justice or Fuel For activism?
By Josh Lepawsky, Joshua Goldstein, and Yvan Schulz On 12 May 2015 the United Nations Environmental Program announced the release of a new report called Waste Crime –…
By Josh Lepawsky & Grace Akese On 20 June 2015 Ghanaian authorities, including military personnel, entered the infamous Old Fadama/Agbogbloshie site in Accra and began violently dispersing the…
Our panel for the annual meeting of the Swiss Ethnological Society will be structured around three questions: What paths do discards take? What factors and mechanisms account for…
The papers in this panel will approach and explore solid waste management histories as enviro-technical systems riddled with political, social, economic, and identity questions.