This is the course site for To Recycle is Not Enough, offered by Ethan Tupelo in Fall 2023 at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.  This blog is for students to explore their more immediate connections with waste, and connect those to the broader themes of the course.  Each week has a general theme, and students have a suggested prompt, although they may post on things beyond the prompt as long as they are related to the themes. Try clicking on a category to see all posts on a given theme.

Course description

Tossing something in the trash is an almost thoughtless, automatic part of our daily existence. How are our habits, practices, systems, and institutions around waste tied in with domination and social inequality? Who does the dirty work, and how is this related to inequalities around class, gender, and race? How have historical changes in materials and waste systems shaped our contemporary understanding of our selves, and our relations with each other? What social assumptions allow waste relations to be seen as an acceptable and inevitable part of contemporary life? Where is this ‘away’ to which we throw, and what are the lives of the people like there? Focusing on waste connects local actions to global systems, encompassing dirty and dangerous work, environmental racism, and ecological devastation. In addition to thinking broadly about these themes, students will also examine their own waste practices, campus and regional waste infrastructures, and our ethical and political entanglements with these systems

This course is organized based on topics and themes of “Discard Studies.” This emerging and expansive field is by necessity interdisciplinary, as waste confounds the boundaries of academic disciplines and methodological approaches. Almost every week has a general theme, although some are spread over multiple weeks. In general, the themes are organized from a narrow zoomed in view of individual practices, slowly expanding our view outwards to waste infrastructures and sites, until we finally reach the global level. We’ll start by examining some classic conceptualizations of waste, and how difficult it is to clearly define this messy topic. The next few weeks will focus on interrelated ‘practices of the self’ that are related to waste: cleaning, hoarding, gifting, shitting, and attempts to reclaim waste through reuse and dumpster diving. We then start to expand our view to see the experiences of those who do the dirty work, how waste infrastructures shape our cities and waste spaces, culminating in the global waste ‘trade.’ Along the way, we’ll examine concepts like recycling, disposability, individual versus collective responsibility, and the ‘circular economy.’ Finally, we’ll end with the ruins created by waste, likely to be the longest lasting material record of human activity on this planet.

While this course is about ‘waste’ as a primary topic, one of the main questions we will grapple with is if we should be so focused on material waste (as almost all environmental approaches do), at the expense of the political, social, and economic system that are the cause of material waste. Most of these themes can be applied to other domains, and may provide a useful methodological approach to studying other topics from the perspective of their wastes.

[For those outside the college, the title of the course is a play on Hampshire College motto, Non Satis Scire (to know is not enough).]