This chapter from the virtual exhibition “The Life of Waste” highlights people who live with waste—landfill workers, waste pickers, trash collectors, sanitation workers—and the social, economic, and health challenges they face.
This chapter from the virtual exhibition “The Life of Waste” discusses the call for radical changes in our consumption and production patterns, and littering behavior. It explores the concepts of zero waste, upcycling, and recycling.
This chapter from the virtual exhibition “The Life of Waste” considers the ways in which waste relates to power. It aligns with power structures, can be an empowering feature, or possess power in and of itself.
This chapter introduces the virtual exhibition “The Life of Waste.” Historian Simone M. Müller discusses six truisms of waste, namely “everything is waste, waste is a matter of perspective, waste needs to be managed, waste is life, waste has power and waste has an expiration date.”
Jennifer Clapp examines the nature of international trade in toxic waste and the roles of multinational corporations and environmental NGOs. Waste transfer has become a routine practice for firms in industrialized countries and poor countries accept these imports but struggle to manage the materials safely. She argues that governments have failed to recognize the voices of protest.
With a focus on global cancer epidemics, Nina Lykke discusses biopolitics in the Anthropocene against the background of a notion of dual governmentality, implying that efforts to make populations live and tendencies to let them die are intertwined.
Triangulating narratives from a prospective mining site in northern Norway, Hugo Reinert works to identify (and render graspable) a particular effect of retroactive shock—tracing its resonance through experiences of chemical exposure, colonial racism, cultural erasure, and destruction of the built environment.
In this article, Sasha Litvintseva examines the history and materiality of asbestos to theorize toxic embodiment through the mutuality of the haptic sense and the breaching of boundaries of inside and outside. She develops this through an analysis of her own film project Asbestos (2016), shot at the mining town of Asbestos, Quebec.
In this selection of poems, Adam Dickinson focuses on the “outside” that is the “inside,” thereby drawing attention to the coextensive and intra-active nature of the body with its environment and the consequent implications for linking the human to the nonhuman and the personal to the global in environmental ethics.
Michael Marder interprets the “toxic flood” we are living or dying through as a global dump. On his reading, multiple levels of existence—from the psychic to the physiological, from the environmental-elemental to the planetary—are being converted into a dump, a massive and still growing hodgepodge of industrial and consumer by-products and emissions; shards of metaphysical ideas and theological dreams; radioactive materials; light, sound, and other modes of sensory pollution; pesticides and herbicides; and so forth.
