Waste as a Critique reveals how waste in its manifold variety provides an innovative starting point for interrogating 21st century society.
Waste as a Critique reveals how waste in its manifold variety provides an innovative starting point for interrogating 21st century society. Drawing on growing interdisciplinary concerns for discards, it contextualizes waste in cultural, symbolic, historical, spatial, and political forms.
The contributions presented demonstrate the potential for waste as a revelatory lens through which the social world may be critically re-examined and assessed. This collection informs a novel critical waste-based epistemology from which to challenge ingrained assumptions, categorical inconsistencies, and unconsidered outcomes in social practice and theory.
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List of Figures
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
1: Hervé Corvellec;David Bevan: Introduction: Towards a Critical Waste-Based
Epistemology
Part I. Materiality
2: Josh Lepawsky: Weaponizing Waste
3: Jennie Olofsson: On the Socio-Material Practices of Leakage Control: Waste
Infrastructures and Bodily Discharges
4: Taru Lehtokunnas;Elina Närvänen: From Thin to Thick Relationships with
Objects: Constituting Subjectivity through Consumer-Object Folds
5: Olli Pyyhtinen;Alma Onali;Stylianos Zavos: Waste as Posthuman Critique
Part II. Society
6: Nadine Arnold: Feeding the Critique of Standards with Waste: Exclusion and
Reactions in Food Systems
7: Marisa Solomon: From Refuse to Refusal: Disrupting Racial Capitalism's
Wasting Relations
8: Jutta Guttberlet;Isabella de Carvalho Vallin: Grassroots Social Innovation
of Waste Pickers as Critique of the Existing Social Order
9: Hervé Corvellec: A Critique of Heroic Efficacy
Part III. Economy
10: Zsuzsa Gille: Waste as a Critique of the Concept of the Economy
11: Melanie Samson: Not at Our Disposal: Reclaimers' Critique of
Disposability Capitalism
12: Patrik Zapata;Marí a José Zapata Campos: Waste Commoning as Critical
Answer to the Property Question
13: Myra J. Hird;Gabriella Dee: Mother Earth and Her Three Little Wasteful
Pigs: Waste Reduction through Degrowth
Part IV. Temporality
14: Kun Wang;Raymond Yu Wang: Waste, Temporalities, and Critique on
Event-Based Environment Justice: A Political Ecology of Slow Violence of
China's Production Wastescapes
15: Zachary Riebeling: Waste and the Historical Future
16: Dietmar Offenhuber: Wasting to Slow Down Time: The Paradox of
Informational Waste
17: Kelly Alexander;Joshua O. Reno: Attempting to Waste Time: An Exploration
of Freewheeling Creativity in Kitchens and Gaming Rooms
Index
Hervé Corvellec has over 20 years of experience in interdisciplinary research environments, during which he has conducted research about railroad planning, risk in public transportation, and wind power siting. This general interest in infrastructures has guided him to focus on the governance, planning, and organizing of waste management; wasting behaviours and practices; waste ethics; waste narratives and discourses; and social-scientific theories of waste. He has published his research about waste and the circular economy in waste journals, as well as journals within the fields of accounting, cultural geography, management, organization theory, and social anthropology.
