1st Edition
The Temporalities of Waste Out of Sight, Out of Time
This book investigates the complex and unpredictable temporalities of waste. Reflecting on waste in the context of sustainability, materiality, social practices, subjectivity and environmental challenges, the book covers a wide range of settings, from the municipal garbage crisis in Beirut, to food rescue campaigns in Hong Kong and the toxic by-products of computer chip production in Silicon Valley.
Waste is one of the most pressing issues of the day, central to environmental challenges and the development of healthier and more sustainable futures. The emergence of the new field of discard studies, in addition to expanding research across other disciplines within the social sciences, is testament to the centrality of waste as a crucial social, material and cultural problem and to the need for multi- and transdisciplinary approaches like those provided in this volume. This edited collection seeks to develop a framework that understands the material properties of different kinds of waste, not as fixed, stable or singular but asdynamic, relational and often invisible. It brings together new and cutting-edge research on the temporalities of waste by a diverse range of international authors. Collectively, this research presents a persuasive argument about the need to give more credence to the capacities of waste to provoke us in materially and temporally complex ways, especially those substances that complicate our understandings of life as bounded duration.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, cultural studies, anthropology and human geography.
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Myra J. Hird
Introduction
Out of joint: the time of waste
Fiona Allon, Ruth Barcan and Karma Eddison-Cogan
Part 1: Speed and Slowness
- Open Crowd: just-in-time food rescue
- Fridges and food waste: an ethnography of freshness
- Chip, body, earth: toxic temporalities of Intel Processor production
- Bio-political temporalities of waste and the municipal collection schedule in the United States
- Housing waste in remote Indigenous Australia
- The imaginaries of Beirut’s ‘invisible’ solid waste: exploring walls as temporal pauses amidst the Beirut garbage crisis
- "All of them had been forgotten": the temporality of wasted life in contemporary Arab fiction
- Lingering matter: materialities, temporalities and everyday forms of waste
- The landfill paradox: reflections on the temporalities of waste
- The waste of time
- Crip Time and the toxic body: water, waste and the autobiographical self
- Wasting seas: oceanic time and temporalities
- Today’s waste is tomorrow’s future: on the temporalities of two post-nuclear sites
- Toxic transmogrification: Rare Earthenware as junk art
- Crunch time: temporalities of scrap metal collection
- New temporalities of everyday life in Australian suburbia: cultural and material economies of hard rubbish reuse
- Temporal cycles of waste management in Southern African Indigenous societies
Daisy Tam
Rebecca Campbell and Gordon Waitt
Luke Munn
Part 2: Bureaucratic time
Raysa Martinez Kruger
Liam Grealy and Tess Lea
Christine Mady
Part 3: Disposability and persistence
Tasnim Qutait
Elyse Stanes
Yusif Idies
Part 4: Long durée and intergenerational time
Elizabeth Graham, Dan Evans and Lindsay Duncan
Ally Day
Elspeth Probyn
Part 5: Collisions and multiplicity
Aleksandra Brylska
Sabine LeBel
Steven Kohm and Kevin Walby
Part 6: Revivals and returns
Tania Lewis, Rowan Wilken and Frédéric Rauturier
Soul Shava and Rob O’Donoghue
Biography
Fiona Allon is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and an affiliate of the Sydney Environment Institute. Ruth Barcan is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and a Sydney Environment Institute Key Researcher. Karma Eddison-Cogan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.
