Talking Trash
Fall 2024
Lectures:
Waste, Refusal, and Relation: Toward a Theory of Abject Assembly
David Giles analyzes the economics and political implications of "safety," the putative threat of the things we abandon, and the significance of those moments in which they resurface, or are reconvened, in those public spheres from which they are excluded. David Giles is an anthropologist who studies food, waste, cities, and social movements. He teaches in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.
Wounded Spaces and Garbage Graveyards: Wastescapes Defined
Martin Melosi analyzes wastescapes: landscapes on the margins, wounded spaces, garbage graveyards, or derelict sites. He is an internationally known historian of the environment, energy, and cities. He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor and Director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston.
Waste and Surplus in the History of American Agriculture
Adam M. Romero explores two different period of American agricultural history: (1) prior to 1945, when American farms became a profitable sink for toxic industrial waste; and (2) the decades following World War II when agricultural output exploded. Adam M. Romero is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at the University of Washington Bothell.
On Shoddy Material: Textile Waste, Self-Fashioning, and the Material Regeneration of Clothing under Capitalism
Hanna Rose Shell explores the history and future potential of a material called shoddy, the product of an industrial system for the regeneration of old clothing and wool waste. Hanna Rose Shell studies aesthetics, media archaeology, textiles, and the interface of art and science. She is a Professor of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts, and Art & History at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The Garbage Patch as Pacific Frontier: How Ocean Plastic Pollution keeps Making Colonial Landforms
Kim De Wolff's talk challenges the conceptual and quite literal “grounds” on which both trash island myth and petrocapitalist expansion persist. Kim De Wolff is a feminist science and technology studies scholar and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Texas.
From Waste to Disposability: The Politics of Revaluing Waste
Mohammed Rafi Arefin examines the inequitable relations and politics baked into the recovery and revaluation of waste. In examining our sanitation systems, Mohammed Rafi Arefin argues that we must not only focus our attention to the study of waste, but also ask what are the human, knowledge, and land relations that are rendered disposable in attempts to revalue and reuse waste? Mohammed Rafi Arefin is an Assistant Professor of Geography (Environmental Justice and Social Change) and a founding member of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Till Death Do We Part: Archaeological Interventions in the Discard of Home Inventories
Anthony Graesch considers whether we owe anything to the objects that once constituted the social lives of households. After decades of aspirational spending, and in houses brimming with tens to hundreds of thousands of objects, North Americans have amassed inventories of belongings that are extraordinary for their scale and complexity. Anthony P. Graesch is an associate professor of anthropology at Connecticut College and an anthropologist whose scholarship and analytic sensibilities are shaped by archaeological method and theory.
The Idea of Waste
John Scanlan talk starts with the premise that waste is inevitable in human society—and ends with a meditation on its inevitability. The Idea of Waste explores how we have grappled with both the material reality and the specter of this shapeshifting phenomenon throughout history—utilizing it, dreaming of overcoming it, yet never escaping it. Scanlan explores what waste is and why it seems to be intrinsic to human life, at every turn, in every age and epoch. Finally, he demonstrates how waste never disappears, but rather only proliferates anew. Scanlan’s compelling narrative shows waste to be both an enduring material consequence of human activity and an idea or state of being. John Scanlan is a cultural historian at the University of Central Lancashire.