2022 Conference

Discard Studies Collaborative Conference 2022

Exploring Disposal’s Past, Present, and Future

September 15-17, 2022
Keynote address and special exhibition of the work of
 
MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES
Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation

 

Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. The Social Mirror (mirror covered Sanitation Truck), 1983. 

Additional Keynote Addresses By:

MAX LIBOIRON
Associate Professor of Geography, Former Associate Vice-President (Indigenous Research), and
Director, Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)
Memorial University of Newfoundland
 
BRENDA CHALFIN
Director of the Center for African Studies and Professor of Anthropology
University of Florida
 
SAMANTHA MACBRIDE
Assistant Professor, Baruch College, CUNY
 
Program   Participants   Abstracts    Register
 

Conference Description:

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of research that focuses on waste and the larger social, political, and economic processes that render certain objects, practices, and populations disposable. Research in this field has questioned the hegemony of recycling (MacBride 2011), traced the colonial effects of pollution (Liboiron 2017), and examined the often-neglected work of waste laborers (Fredericks 2018; Nagle 2013). This emergent scholarship is coalescing under the interdisciplinary field of Discard Studies which is driven by the question how, why, and to whom do waste, discards, and disposal matter? (Moore 2012). Discard Studies has inspired new avenues of inquiry in diverse areas of scholarship including the history of capitalism, aesthetics and design, urbanization, colonialism, language and power, environmental justice, and social movements and social change.

Greater academic attention to discards has, in large part, been driven by waste’s increasing importance in everyday politics and life. From environmental justice struggles against transnational toxic dumping regimes (Lepawsky 2018) and campaigns to reduce single use plastics, to social movements mobilizing human waste to interrupt state repression (McFarlane and Silver 2016), waste and its management are problems that are at the heart of contemporary debates about how to deal with rapid and unprecedented environmental change and further projects of social justice.

Building on this important moment in which waste and disposability have garnered increased attention, the Discard Studies Collaborative at New York University will host a conference to both take stock of work done under the broad label of Discard Studies and discuss the future of the readily emerging field. This conference will take place around themes familiar to discardians including labor, urban and environmental governance, and protest while also asking how Discard Studies might incorporate new and urgent issues such as anthropogenic environmental change in a world structured by colonial, racialized, gendered and classed violence.

The conference will take place over three days at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. It will bring together new and established scholars working on discards and related themes to evaluate the state of this emergent field and identify new directions for future research.

 

 

          

            

Conference Location:

The Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU
1 Washington Place
New York, New York 10003