CfP: Long-term waste, Slow disasters
Waste is considered ubiquitous and an inevitable outcome of living in “Late Industrialism.” (Fortun 2014). The cumulative outcomes of societies informed by ideas of growth have manifested in multiple ways thus not always readily visible to the eye. Waste depends on systems and infrastructures that remove unwanted or discarded materials in order to make problems of waste invisible and the system(s) seem coherent (Liboiron & Lepawsky 2022). While waste may seem inevitable in modern life, managing and administrating waste is both politically and socially contested and opens up questions of responsibility and expertise. The seemingly innocent packaging is connected to larger systems where economic ideas or technological advantages do not always provide adequate answers (or solutions) to a booming waste economy. Moreover, as historians have shown, global waste trade is deeply implicated in colonial and capitalist structures of exploitation (Müller etc) . “The future of plastic is in the garbage can” the quote that STS Metis scholar Max Liboiron uses to remind us that disposability is not only produced and intimately connected to increasing consumption, the quote also suggests that waste has a history (Liboiron 2021).
Therefore, this panel addresses the long histories of waste and excess through the 20th century. Inspired by Joseph Masco who argues that the crisis in crisis (also waste crises) stems from the failure to examine the historical conditions and thus the roots of the crises, we invite proposals that analyze waste as temporal phenomena with a past, a present, and a future. “
Panel conveners: Nina Toudal Jessen (Post doc. University of Copenhagen) & Sebastian Lundsteen (Phd. The Greenhouse/University of Stavanger).
Contact: Sebastian Lundsteen