Waste

Waste as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering

Rather than concentrating only on how waste is defined or regulated in (international) law, this episode foregrounds the material patterns of dis/ordering that thinking through waste reveals and generates. This entails an attentiveness to the ethical positions, material practices, and shifting legal geographies that help us navigate the world from the vantage point of its wastelands. How can we trace the arteries of power and modes of production that constitute the ‘Molysmocene’ – the ‘geological era shaped by human waste and its management’? Which historical legacies, worldviews, and material entanglements have shaped this saturation and contamination with waste? Which avenues for action are available in such political landscapes of plasticity and pollution?

The speakers:

Heather Davis is an Assistant Professor and Program Director in Culture and Media at The New School in New York. Her work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022) explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation. She also co-edited, with Etienne Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015). Heather is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary collaboration between visual artists, cultural workers and scientists, who work together to sample, map, understand, and visualize the complexities of plastics and micro-plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region.

Michael Hennessy Picard is Lecturer in International Environmental Law at the University of Edinburgh School of Law, where he also teaches Waste Law. His research focuses on the transnational regulation of global waste objects, from the recycling of shipwrecks to the (mis)management of outer space debris. He co-edited Wastiary: A Bestiary of Waste (UCL Press, 2023), which offers 35 short entries on the waste of humans and humans treated as waste, illustrated with artwork, photography, collage and mixed media.

Event Resources:

·      Heather Davis, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022)

·      Heather Davis, ‘Plastic Media’ (e-flux, 2022)

·      Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, ‘On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene’ (2017)

·      Heather Davis, ‘Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures’ (2015)

·      Michael H. Picard et al. (eds), Wastiary: A Bestiary of Waste (UCL Press, 2023)

·      Michael H. Picard  and Olivier Barsalou, ‘Exploring the Planetary Boundaries Wasteland: International Law and the Advent of the Molysmocene’ (2021)

·      Tina Beigi and Michael H. Picard, ‘Regimes of Waste (Im)Perceptibility in the Life Cycle of Metal’ (2020)

·      Michael H. Picard et al., ‘Welcome to the Molysmocene’ (Critical Legal Thinking, 2017)

·      Alice Mah, Toxic Expertise

·      Michelle Murphy, Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations

·      Anna Tsing, Feral Atlas

·      Discard Studies Compendium

·      Gabrielle Hecht, Residual Governance – How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures

·      Simone M. Müller, The Toxic Ship – The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade

·      Marco Armiero, Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump (CUP, 2021)