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Waste Collection

The Ecologies, Politics, and Complexities of Discard

Waste Collection cover

Waste Collection

The Ecologies, Politics, and Complexities of Discard

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Pre-order. Available May 27 2027
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Description

Waste Collection is an interdisciplinary anthology that features a diverse collection of global scholarship diving into the ecologies of waste and discard. It features 27 concepts and case studies, focused on waste as a nature-cultural concept, for considering how worlds are built and destroyed by our enmeshment with, and reliance, upon waste.

Contributors represent a variety of disciplines across the social sciences, humanities, and sciences, including art and design; politics, literary studies; civil and environmental engineering; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; environmental humanities; and, film and media studies, among others. Chapters also offer diverse geographic focuses, including textile waste in West Africa, e-waste recycling in China, environmental remediation in South Korea, the impacts of nuclearism in Japan, nomadic relationships to waste and reuse in North Africa, and cultures of thrift and innovation in India, to name a few regions highlighted by the collection.

The book seeks to thwart an understanding of waste as peripheral and “throw away.” Instead, it is committed to unpacking how waste is not an isolable, fixed entity; it is always an assemblage of the human, nonhuman, and more-than-human. In other words, and as Myra Hird argues in her foreword to the collection, waste acts as a material and conceptual anchor for the complexities, ecologies, and global power dynamics of contemporary life.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Anchoring Waste As/Is by Myra Hird
Introduction: On Waste Worlding by Sage Gerson and Jeremy Chow
Section 1: WASTE INFRASTRUCTURES
Chapter 1: BIOFILM Microbial Glitch and the Media of the Foul by Lisa Han
Chapter 2: DEBRIS On Dirt, Infrastructural Risk, and the Aesthetics of Catastrophe by Amelyn Ng
Chapter 3: SINKS Kitchens, Landfills, and Tundras by Amaru Tejeda
Section 2: WASTE AS MEMORY
Chapter 4: ARCHIVE Reading Waste in the Planetary Record by Jennifer M. Gutman
Chapter 5: ISRAF Waste in the Pre-colonial Sahara by Erragab Eljanhaoui
Chapter 6: MATERIAL WITNESS Waste, Documentary Testimony, and Contemporary Eco-Art by Ben Ogrodnik
Chapter 7: WRECKAGE Spectacular Transmotion Along Southeast American Shores by Sara A. Rich
Section 3: REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE
Chapter 8: FASHION African Consumption of and Alternatives to Textile Waste by Adwoa Owusuaa Bobie
Chapter 9: JUGAAD Resistance through Waste and Innovation by Urvi Sharma
Chapter 10: SECONDHAND EXTRACTION Media Afterlives and the Material Politics of E-Waste in China by Tinghao Zhou
Chapter 11: THRIFT Reading the Social Life of Waste by Minu Susan Koshy
Chapter 12: WASTEWATER Environmental Engineering meets Queer Theory by Austin Wadle
Section 4: WASTED LIVES
Chapter 13: BIOHAZARD The Queer Stigma and Pride of HIV Positivity by Jeremy Chow
Chapter 14: NUCLEARISM “Irradiated-Bodies-as-Waste” and Legacies of Transnational Radioactive Residues by Kyoko Matsunaga
Chapter 15: SURVIVAL Trans Embodiment Beyond Waste at the End of the World by Alexa Foor
Chapter 16: VOID Mother, Otherworld, Liberatory Unbeing by Zoe Goldstein
Chapter 17: WASTEOCENE Mount Everest, Socio-Ecological Toxicity, and John Krakauer's Into Thin Air by Valerio Angeletti
Section 5: ENVIRONMENTAL IN/JUSTICE
Chapter 18: AGENCY Re-Imagining Waste Disposal, Environmental (In)Justice, and Entanglement in Contemporary Speculative Fiction by Nan Song
Chapter 19: ENERGY Wastelands, Sacrifice Zones, and Environmental Justice by Sage Gerson
Chapter 20: FECAL SIEGE Living with the Industrial Ecologies of North Carolina's Pig Farms by Stephanie Eccles
Chapter 21: FORAGE Waste, Law, and Queer Ecologies from English Commons to Palestinian Hillsides and Cornish Mine Tailings by M.A. Miller
Chapter 22: PLASTICITY Thinking with Plasticfuturisms by Ela Przybylo

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published May 27 2027
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Pages 464
ISBN 9781350583337
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions 9 x 5 inches
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Sage Gerson

Sage Gerson is Assistant Professor of Literary Art…

Anthology Editor

Jeremy Chow

Jeremy Chow is Associate Professor of English and…

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