The Dirt
Discard studies is an emerging field that takes systems of waste and wasting as its topic of study, including but beyond conventional notions of trash and garbage. To…
Tag: Waste
PSA: Beware of Easy Narratives
This is a Twitter essay by Josh Lepawsky (@rubbishmaker) about one of many recent examples of reporting on the e-waste trade. Many of the problems specific to the…
Pollution Does Not “Go Away”: Mylar Balloons and Air Quality in California’s Pristine Wastelands
By Julia Sizek, University of California at Berkeley § Joshua Tree National Park regularly ranks as the National Park with the second-worst air quality, but its pollution is…
Privy2
This summer I’ve been working with students and colleagues in the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State to install a demonstration garden, titled “Privy2: Biosolids and You.”…
Rethinking Remediation
Mining is, as some in the industry quip, primarily a waste management industry.
Queering chemicals (EDCs): A bibliography
Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) are a class of environmental toxicants that may impact sex, gender, and sexuality. Here is our bibliography on queering EDCs.
Single Shot: Tractors on Kochi Beach
I was used to seeing the sand coated in washed up Styrofoam, thongs, coconut shells, and water hyacinth. However, on this day I was greeted with tractors, preparing…
A Story of Us
For the past several years, the graduate students of the Ohio State Department of Anthropology have produced A Story of Us, a podcast that is sponsored by the…
When your research is attacked
Attacks on research have become routinized and institutionalized. Here is our step-by-step guide on what to do if you and your research are attacked.
Top Discard Studies articles in 2018
What are the most frequently read articles on Discard Studies? You might be surprised by #1!
The what and the why of Discard Studies
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…
Book Review: Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump by Kathleen M. Millar
In Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump, Kathleen M. Millar offers a new ethnographic study of Jardim Gramacho, the biggest waste dump in Latin America until its…
Book Review: Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India by Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey
In Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India, authors Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey offer a compendious account of waste in India, exploring its implication in questions of economic…
Why Is This Trash Can Yelling at Me? Big Bellies and Clean Green Gentrification
“Pssst. There’s something really special happening here. I’m collecting five times more trash than the other guys and using solar energy to compact it all. Welcome to downtown…
Beach by Meg Samuelson
Beaches are good places to think with about waste and ruination. They were once generically places of waste (in the etymological sense of “unoccupied, uncultivated”) while recognized as…
Discard Studies going dark, being reborn in 2018
Dear Discard Studies Readers, I have been posting on this blog every week for the past seven years. It has been a pleasure. I began as a PhD…
Article Alert! New texts in discard studies (Nov & Dec 2017)
Since critical discard studies doesn’t (yet!) have its own journal, conference, or department, Discard Studies publishes a regular table of contents alerts for articles, reports, and books in…
Opportunities in Discard Studies (Dec 2017)
Call for papers: JEP 2019-1 Waste and globalised inequalities Special Issue Editor: Nicolas Schlitz, Stefan Laser Global capitalism and its transnational production networks have grown and changed…
#3 The flies that bind: Assa Doron talks waste in India
In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Assa Doron talks about India’s waste, both liquid and solid, and the physical and institutional infrastructures that handle it–or fail to, plus the…
A Bibliography on Demolition Waste and Deconstruction
By Susan Ross Construction, renovation, and demolition (CR&D) waste can represent from 30 to 50% of municipal solid waste (Yeheyis et al, 2013). Yet this area of discard…
Keyword: Deconstruction Waste (Building)
By Susan Ross Building deconstruction refers to the careful taking apart of a building to salvage its reusable materials and components. These are either stored on site for…
Announcements and Calls for Participation in Discard Studies (Nov 2017)
A collection of Discard Studies news items, calls for papers, positions, grants and awards. CFP: Special Issue on the Contested realities of the Circular Economy Deadline: November 15th 2018…
Article Alert! New Texts in Discard Studies (October 2017)
Since critical discard studies doesn’t (yet!) have its own journal, conference, or department, Discard Studies publishes a regular table of contents alerts for articles, reports, and books in…
Waste by Jennifer Wenzel
Waste is a tricky word. In our meditations in Somatosphere, waste hews toward its concrete sense as discard: material byproducts of some transformative process, metabolic or mechanical; things…