Waste as a Critique

Waste as a Critique reveals how waste in its manifold variety provides an innovative starting point for interrogating 21st century society. Drawing on growing interdisciplinary concerns for discards, it contextualizes waste in cultural, symbolic, historical, spatial, and political forms. The contributions presented demonstrate the potential for waste as a revelatory lens through which the social world may be critically re-examined and assessed. This collection informs a novel critical waste-based epistemology from which to challenge ingrained assumptions, categorical inconsistencies, and unconsidered outcomes in social practice and theory. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

1 - Introduction: Towards a Critical Waste-Based Epistemology
2 - Weaponizing Waste
3 - On the Socio-Material Practices of Leakage Control: Waste Infrastructures and Bodily Discharges
4 - From Thin to Thick Relationships with Objects: Constituting Subjectivity through Consumer-Object Folds
5 - Waste as Posthuman Critique
6 - Feeding the Critique of Standards with Waste: Exclusion and Reactions in Food Systems
7 - From Refuse to Refusal: Disrupting Racial Capitalism's Wasting Relations
8 - Grassroots Social Innovation of Waste Pickers as Critique of the Existing Social Order
9 - A Critique of Heroic Efficacy
10 - Waste as a Critique of the Concept of the Economy
11 - Not at Our Disposal: Reclaimers' Critique of Disposability Capitalism
12 - Waste Commoning as Critical Answer to the Property Question
13 - Mother Earth and Her Three Little Wasteful Pigs: Waste Reduction through Degrowth
14 - Waste, Temporalities, and Critique on Event-Based Environment Justice: A Political Ecology of Slow Violence of China's Production Wastescapes
15 - Waste and the Historical Future
16 - Wasting to Slow Down Time: The Paradox of Informational Waste
17 - Attempting to Waste Time: An Exploration of Freewheeling Creativity in Kitchens and Gaming Rooms

Hervé Corvellec has over 20 years of experience in interdisciplinary research environments, during which he has conducted research about railroad planning, risk in public transportation, and wind power siting. This general interest in infrastructures has guided him to focus on the governance, planning, and organizing of waste management; wasting behaviours and practices; waste ethics; waste narratives and discourses; and social-scientific theories of waste. He has published his research about waste and the circular economy in waste journals, as well as journals within the fields of accounting, cultural geography, management, organization theory, and social anthropology.