Talking Trash
Fall 2024
Lectures:
Waste, Refusal, and Relation: Toward a Theory of Abject Assembly
David Giles analyzes the economics and political implications of "safety," the putative threat of the things we abandon, and the significance of those moments in which they resurface, or are reconvened, in those public spheres from which they are excluded. David Giles is an anthropologist who studies food, waste, cities, and social movements. He teaches in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.
Wounded Spaces and Garbage Graveyards: Wastescapes Defined
Martin Melosi analyzes wastescapes: landscapes on the margins, wounded spaces, garbage graveyards, or derelict sites. He is an internationally known historian of the environment, energy, and cities. He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor and Director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston.
Waste and Surplus in the History of American Agriculture
Adam M. Romero explores two different period of American agricultural history: (1) prior to 1945, when American farms became a profitable sink for toxic industrial waste; and (2) the decades following World War II when agricultural output exploded. Adam M. Romero is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at the University of Washington Bothell.
On Shoddy Material: Textile Waste, Self-Fashioning, and the Material Regeneration of Clothing under Capitalism
Hanna Rose Shell explores the history and future potential of a material called shoddy, the product of an industrial system for the regeneration of old clothing and wool waste. Hanna Rose Shell studies aesthetics, media archaeology, textiles, and the interface of art and science. She is a Professor of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts, and Art & History at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The Garbage Patch as Pacific Frontier: How Ocean Plastic Pollution keeps Making Colonial Landforms
Kim De Wolff's talk challenges the conceptual and quite literal “grounds” on which both trash island myth and petrocapitalist expansion persist. Kim De Wolff is a feminist science and technology studies scholar and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Texas.