A Brief History of Anti-Capitalism, Pulled from a Dumpster
By Alex V. Barnard “Seeing all the waste exposes very clearly the priorities in our society, that making a profit is more important than feeding people, than preserving the…
Tag: Consumption
Waiting for the Future
Call it what you will: an anecdotal and impressionist narrative, or a set of strung-together fieldnotes, collected over years of living and working with people across class lines…
The Politics of Recycling vs. Reusing
Calling reuse “recycling” a common and seemingly simple mistake, yet it is extremely important to differentiate between the two for political and environmental reasons.
The future of work is consumption
One hears a lot of exuberant talk these days about the futures of work. Offices will go away, we’re told, or be significantly scaled back as employees work…
How to do a household waste audit–and why
A waste audit is an analysis of a localized waste stream from your building, household, classroom, town or business. It can identify what types of waste that local…
Piping as poison: the Flint water crisis and America’s toxic infrastructure
Over the past few decades, we have met with much success in curbing some of Americans’ exposure to lead. Yet they have struggled to contain this continuing danger…
CFP: Pharmaceuticals out of Bounds
When birth control hormones are found in drinking water and fish in streams contain Prozac, it is time to acknowledge that pharmaceuticals have gone rogue. Conference: 4S, Barcelona.…
PLAN’s Plastic-Free Campus Manual
The Plastic Free Campus Manual includes not only consumer alternatives to disposable plastics, but more importantly, organizing advice on running campaigns, working with administration, facilitating c…
New Book! Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water
The book considers the assemblage and emergence of a mass market for water, from the invention of the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle in 1973 to the development of…
Trading on Obsolescence on the Streets of Hong Kong
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…
Emergent Socialities of Waste
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…
Mobilizing concepts across disciplines: An economic analysis
There are many lenses through which we can think about mobility. There is no one correct lens to use; in fact, adopting different lenses at different moments can…
Tuberculosis: more anthropologists wanted
Nhat preparing a sample to be tested in the GeneXpert system If tuberculosis (TB) is so often described as the quintessential social disease, why aren’t more researchers in the…
Tuberculosis in Prisons
Last year I wrote a blog post for the TB CRE covering a story about Ravindra Patil who died of tuberculosis after having spent time in Mumbai…
Do Not Keep Quiet: Subverting the Rules of Cinema Viewing in Sunnyside, Pretoria
By Dennis Webster Near to where I live in Sunnyside in Pretoria is a shopping centre called Sterland. The Ster-Kinekor there seems to be the exception to all…