Author Archives: Ethan Tupelo

Archaeology – prompt

Choose an object you routinely throw in the trash. (Include a photo if possible.) Imagine an archaeologist excavating this object 1000 years in the future.  What conclusions do you think they will be able to draw about you or your culture based on this object, where it was placed, and the other things they will likely find around it?  What are some possible incorrect assumptions they may have about you or your culture based on these material remains?

Readings from this week:

Shanks, Michael, David Platt, and William L. Rathje. “The Perfume of Garbage: Modernity and the Archaeological.” Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 1 (2004): 61–83. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2004.0027.

Edensor, Tim. “Waste Matter – The Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World.” Journal of Material Culture 10, no. 3 (November 2005): 311–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183505057346.

Circular economy – prompt

Choose a kind of material object you regularly interact with that is not part a circular economic system. (Which is probably almost anything!) Speculate on how this kind of object could redesigned to be part of a circular economy, by changing its composition and connected infrastructures. In addition to the material components, what other social aspects that we’ve discussed throughout the course would need to change as well for this to be a desirable future?

Readings from this week:

McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. “Waste Equals Food.” In Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. 1st ed. New York: North Point Press, 2002, 92-117.

Visual Capitalist. “Visualized: The Circular Economy 101,” January 13, 2022. https://metals.visualcapitalist.com/sp/visualized-the-circular-economy-101/.

Genovese, Andrea, and Mario Pansera. “The Circular Economy at a Crossroads: Technocratic Eco-Modernism or Convivial Technology for Social Revolution?” Capitalism Nature Socialism 32, no. 2 (April 3, 2021): 95–113. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2020.1763414.

(Also feel free to include the utopian readings from last week, or any others that are relevant!)

Waste disruption – prompt

Write about something you’ve observed where waste disrupts your perception of how things should ‘normally’ function. What does this disruption reveal about the forms of domination and violence in ‘normal’ everyday social systems? Think about examples from the readings this week, such as waste being used as a resistance tactic in social movements, or police using waste to justify aggression against social groups, or the utopian imaginings of waste in future societies, but feel free to go beyond these. 

Readings for this week:

Moore, Sarah A. (2009) “The excess of modernity: Garbage politics in Oaxaca, Mexico.” Professional Geographer 61: 426–437.

“Lebanese Say #YouStink to Government’s Garbage Crisis and Corruption.” PBS NewsHour, August 31, 2015. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/lebanon-trash.

Kohn, Alice. “Trash Crisis Forces Lebanon’s Environmental Awakening.” Deutsche Welle, December 27, 2016. http://www.dw.com/en/trash-crisis-forces-lebanons-environmental-awakening/a-36765579.

Liboiron, Max. “Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement.” Social Movement Studies 11, nos. 3-4 (2012): 393-401.

Asimov, Isaac. “Strikebreaker.” In Robot Dreams. New York: Ace, 1986, 127-138.

Morris, William. News from Nowhere. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918. (Chapters 6,7,15; pages 45-62, 117-126.)

Pollution – prompt

Write about one of your regular activities in which some amount of pollution is an assumed component, but perhaps rarely directly discussed. (This can be a waste practice you have already written about that you want to reexamine from this perspective, or something new.) If we moved from accepting some amount of this kind of pollution to prohibiting this pollution entirely, would your actions be possible?  How would they change?

Readings this week:

(May also be worth revisiting Moore’s conceptualizing waste chart from a few weeks ago, especially the concept that treat waste as something that can be managed and contained, versus avoided at all costs.)

Liboiron, Max. “Land, Nature, Resource, Property.” In Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021, 39-79.

National Association for PET Container Resources. “Report on Postconsumer PET Container Recycling Activity in 2017,” November 15, 2018. https://napcor.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/NAPCOR_2017RateReport_FINAL_rev.pdf. (Focus primarily on the graphs on pages 4 and 13)

MacBride, Samantha. “Does Recycling Actually Conserve or Preserve Things?” Discard Studies (blog), February 11, 2019. https://discardstudies.com/2019/02/11/12755/.

Katz, Cheryl. “Piling Up: How China’s Ban on Importing Waste Has Stalled Global Recycling.” Yale E360. Accessed December 30, 2019. https://e360.yale.edu/features/piling-up-how-chinas-ban-on-importing-waste-has-stalled-global-recycling.

Schlossberg, Tala, and Nayeema Raza. “Opinion | The Great Recycling Con.” The New York Times , December 9, 2019, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/recycling-myths.html

John Oliver on plastics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiu9GSOmt8E

 

Disposability – prompt

Choose something you regularly interact with that is typically considered to be disposable. (Include a photo if possible.) What makes us able to think of this object ‘disposable?’ Think about the material aspects of the object (how it is constructed), the social/cultural aspects (such as meanings, goals, and symbols the object represents), and the infrastructural connections (where it likely came from and where it will likely go).

Readings this week:

Stouffer, Lloyd. “Plastics Packaging: Today and Tomorrow.” Chicago: The Society of the Plastics Industry Inc., 1963.

Acaroglu, Leyla. “Design for Disposability.” Disruptive Design (blog), January 3, 2018. https://medium.com/disruptive-design/design-for-disposability-962647cbcbb0.

Hawkins, Gay. “Disposability.” Discard Studies, May 21, 2019. https://discardstudies.com/2019/05/21/disposability/.

Wright, Melissa W. 2006. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism. New York, NY: Routledge. (Intro 1-6, Ch 2 23-44)

Conceptualizing Waste – prompt

In the reading this week, Moore maps out several different ways of conceptualizing waste, many of which we have already tacitly been using. Choose a waste object, and use at least three of her conceptualizations of waste to explain how this waste object can be understood differently from these perspectives. Does one of these conceptualization seem to make more sense for understanding why your object is considered to be waste? This can be a waste object you’ve already written about, or something new.

A four quadrant plot of different conceptualizations of waste from Moore 2012

A four quadrant plot of different conceptualizations of waste from Moore 2012

Readings from this week:

Moore, S. A. “Garbage Matters: Concepts in New Geographies of Waste.” Progress in Human Geography 36, no. 6 (December 1, 2012): 780–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132512437077.

Distancing infrastructures – prompt

Choose a place on campus or in the immediate region.  Describe how this space is physically structured around waste infrastructures, broadly understood, especially if they are structured around distancing people from waste.  Try to choose a space that isn’t obviously a waste site, like not a local waste transfer station, but one where we wouldn’t normally think of waste.  Include photos of the space in your description.  

Readings from this week:

Rathje, William L., and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. (Chapter 4 and 5; pages 81-132)

Calvino, Italo. “Continuous Cities I.” In Invisible Cities. 1st Harvest/HBJ ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, 114-6.

Clapp, Jennifer. “The Distancing of Waste: Overconsumption in a Global Economy.” In Confronting Consumption, edited by Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002, 155–76.

Responsibility and waste workers – prompt

The readings for the last week and a half connect issues of personal responsibility for environmental issues (like waste) with who does the work with dealing with it (you, waste haulers, sorters, etc). This week, choose a specific form of waste. (This could build off of one of your previous posts, or it could be something new.) When dealing with this waste, what do you consider to be your responsibility? What/where/when is the point where it becomes someone else’s responsibility? Do you believe this is an appropriate point to mark this division of labor, and why? Do you know who deals with this waste next, and what their work is like? If you do, briefly describe it, and if you don’t know, what do you imagine their work to be like?

Readings from this and last week:

Maniates, Michael F. “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” Global Environmental Politics 1, no. 3 (2001): 31–52.

Royte, Elizabeth. “Dark Angels of Detritus.” In Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. First edition. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005, 19-31.

Nagle, Robin. “You are a San Man” and “We Eat Our Own.” In Picking up: On the Streets and behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. First edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, 105-112, 143-154.

Tupelo, Ethan. “Revaluing Capitalist Waste Through Worker Ownership.” In Debris of Progress: A Political Ethnography of Critical Infrastructure. University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2022.

Reclaiming waste – prompt

Rescue something that seems useful to you that was placed in a waste bin/bag/dumpster. Post photos of the object and where you got it from if possible, and describe both of these. What was the experience of retrieving this object like for you? What from the readings this week (and earlier) can help to explain why this object has been treated as waste? Could or should it have been treated otherwise?

Relevant readings from last week:

Barnard, Alex V. “A Brief History of a Tomato.” In Freegans: Diving into the Wealth of Food Waste in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016, 1–23

California v. Greenwood. 1988. 486 U.S. 35.

A shitty prompt

What do your everyday behaviors around shit reveal about our culture, history, or power relations, broadly defined? You can use the main themes of the readings as a starting point if you wish, such as Gerling’s connections with indoor plumbing and colonialism and racial hierarchies, or Simmons’ resurfacing of utopian socialist thought from 19th century French theorists who saw shit as a resource, but feel free to excrete other shitty connections if you feel so moved.

Readings from this week:

Pliny, The Natural History, Book XXVIII, Chapters 13, 18.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D28%3Achapter%3D13

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D28%3Achapter%3D18

Gerling, Daniel Max. “Excrementalisms: Revaluing What We Have Only Ever Known as Waste.” Food, Culture & Society 22, no. 5 (2019): 622–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2019.1638126.

Simmons, Dana. “Waste Not, Want Not: Excrement and Economy in Nineteenth-Century France.” Representations 96, no. 1 (November 1, 2006): 73–98. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2006.96.1.73.