#discard studies

[selfportrait27]

A Taxonomy of Unformed Objects

What is it about our present—what forces, what infrastructures of global capital, conditions of planetary climate change, non-innocent affec

SLOW VIOLENCE: Large-scale forms of incremental chronic becoming of uneven worlds caused by global capitalism, a chronic alteration that stretches over intergenerational spans of time.

AFFECTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS: Entities that cannot be fully captured in representations and are rendered through non-representational engagements of embodiment and feeling by scientists. 

ILLNESSES YOU HAVE TO FIGHT TO HAVE: Embodied states that technoscience does not register as a coherent disease entity can become partially materialized through struggle even as they are viewed as improperly organized by biomedicine.

CLOUDS: Loose and dynamic assemblies of relations that make up the atmosphere that evokes an entity.

[selfportrait27]

The unspeakable matter

While we often post article alerts about new scholarship on garbage matters, I wanted to take a moment to re-visit Ellen Handy’s 1995 essay,

Historical evidence abounds testifying to how cities such as London had “back streets…strewn with human excrements”, yet the “refuse of those slums were seldom, if ever, apparent in literary or or visual artistic representations”.   The English health reformer, Sir Edwin Chadwick describes the alleys that Annan photographed, noting how “the dungheap received all the filth which the swarm of wretched inhabitants could give” (qtd. in Handy 115). Handy wonders where the staggering quantity of human excrement went? Where were the towering dungheaps in the literature and photography of the era? Charles Dickens, writes Handy, referred to the mounds of organic filth as “dust.” He used “evasive, allusive terminology”. “Dickens,” argues Handy, “dessicated humid massy excrement through language” while “Annan diluted it through pictorial metonymy”. Both “transformed the unspeakable matter into other substances”.

[principleofplenitude]

I urge discard studies scholars, teachers, and writers to clarify how and why they are using the idea of “matter out of place” in relation to discards because I find that there are three different core ways matter out of place is used in relation to discards, and they are not synonymous and each have different meanings and ramifications, but usually, they are conflated. “Matter out of place” is used: as a way to theorize power and power relations, particularly how power is maintained when challenged; as a way to think about the relationship between “brute” materials (PVC, dead bodies, recyclables) and the social, political, and cultural work of uneven relations with materials (toxic injustice, purity, abjection); as a spatial argument, sometimes in terms of how spatiality is a technique of power, and sometimes in a more literal sense of where something is or is not, such as in sorting practices. Some of these uses of matter out of place build on each other and are complementary, and sometimes they are used in mutually exclusive ways. Often, I see them used without attention to the important differences between them. As some scholars have noted, “It is almost too easy to repeat it without further critical reflection or contextualisation: it becomes reified. Even if we accept the argument, numerous writers since Douglas have observed, as Mary Douglas’ biographer and literary executor Richard Fardon notes, “that the formulation is not reversible: all matter out of place is not dirt’.”3 We want to de-reify the phrase and recover the concept of dirt’s specific strength and usefulness as a theory of power.

“Waste is not “matter out of place”“ from Discard Studies

[rachelcarsoncenter]

Hazardous Hope—The Debate

“An Academic Play in One Act”

by Simone M. Müller, Ayushi Dhawan, Maximilian Feichtner, and Jonas Stuck

[Four scholars stare at their computers. They enter the virtual stage through Skype. It’s a global conversation crossing 3,5 continents, 4 countries, and 3 time zones: it’s the middle of the night in one place, early morning in another, midday somewhere else. All four are worn out by the heat…

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[citationpractices]

Refusal As Research Method

So far on the citation practices challenge tumblr, we’ve thought through how we cite, who we cite, and the material structures conditioning the possibilities for citing some, but not Others. In this compelling article Alex Zahara, writing from the perspective of Discard Studies, directs our attention to ethnographic refusal as a means of decolonizing research following the intellectual imprints of many decolonizing and indigenous studies scholars (Smith 1999, Zavala 2013, Tuck and Yang 2014).

“Ethnographic refusal is a practice by which researchers and research participants together decide not to make particular information available for use within the academy. Its purpose is not to bury information, but to ensure that communities are able to respond to issues on their own terms. An ethnographic refusal is intended to redirect academic analysis away from harmful pain-based narratives that obscure slow violence, and towards the structures and institutions that engender those narratives. It is a method centrally concerned with a community’s right to self-representation.”

Check it out!

--Fi

http://discardstudies.com/2016/03/21/refusal-as-research-method-in-discard-studies/

[ifiwereahoarder]

CFP: Looking at Junk

We will examine the limits of knowledge in a disposable world and how that shapes us as graduate students and people.

[ifiwereahoarder]

[tenderqueermosexual]

This is why the properly aesthetic attitude of the radical ecologist is not that of admiring or longing for a pristine nature of virgin forests and clear sky, but rather of accepting waste as such, of discovering the aesthetic potential of waste, of decay, of the inertia of rotten material that serves no purpose.

— Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times