Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Patrick O'Hare
(University of St Andrews)
Tridibesh Dey (Wageningen University and Research)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Evidence
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel invites anthropological and ethnographic contributions that help to better situate and understand the material politics of “plastic”: iconic substance of the anthropocene and “wonder-material” turned serial polluter. Who is (made) responsible for intractable plastic and how?
Long Abstract:
Plastic has steadily, if unevenly, risen up the global political and public agenda, through campaigns and discourses that often rely on specific (often visual) registers of environmental contamination and anthropogenic catastrophe. The days of optimism at plastic’s endless possibilities are seemingly long gone. Yet we are entangled with the heterogeneous materials covered by the catch-all term "plastic" as never before. This has given rise to seemingly utopian desires/interventions to make naturecultures "plastic-free", even as the separation of the human (or the "living") from the synthetic has become ever-more problematic (deWolff 2017), highlighted by controversies over micro-plastics and broader assertions that “we are all contaminated” (Renfrew 2018). Pathak and Nichter (2019: 309) note a “remarkable lack of anthropological research on plastics”. For Dey and Michael (forthcoming), plastics’ heterogeneity, multiplicity, and ubiquity render them hugely problematic – perhaps even intractable – as objects of study. Yet these very aspects also render plastics urgent “matters of concern”. This panel invites critical reflections on both a wider ethico-political economy of responsibility for plastics and a more nuanced idea of response-ability (in the dual sense of taking responsibility and being attuned to/skilled in responding to human/ non-human others). Paper themes may include but are not limited to: everyday engagements, alterations, and interventions with plastics and cognate materials; (citizen)science debates and controversies around efficacy, health and harm; disputes over the temporality, durability, and transience of plastics; anti-plastic campaigns; and the circular/linear imaginaries that link plastic design, marketing, consumption, use, disposal and ongoing agencies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the triple aspect of “responsibility” in relation to an island's plastic pollution problem. I explore debates about who is responsible for removal of the plastic, sentiments about who is blamed for the problem and questions about responsible or irresponsible behaviour .
Paper long abstract:
This paper responds to Pathak and Nichter’s call for studies of how the global phenomenon of plastic pollution is experienced at a local level, focusing on the Western Isles, an archipelago of the west coast of Scotland. Renowned for the “unspoiled” natural beauty of their coastline, the Hebrides suffer increasingly from marine plastic pollution. During the winter of 2019-2020, a higher than usual number of storms (likely due to anthropogenic climate change) have beaten against the eroding shoreline of the islands, and washed up large amounts of plastic onto their pristine beaches. This coincides with an ongoing problem of fly-tipping on the islands’ coastlines. As such some of the waste that chokes coastal habitats in the Western Isles is local, and some of it is decidedly not (for instance a Japanese bleach bottle was recently washed up in South Uist). In the wake of this, communities are mobilising in different ways to organise beach cleans or campaign to reduce to plastic use at the household level. Drawing from ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in South Uist, this paper explores the triple aspect of “responsibility” in relation to the islands’ plastic pollution problem. In the first sense, I explore debates about who is responsible for removal of the plastic from the beaches. In the second, I examine sentiments about who is responsible for the problem in the sense of attaching blame. Finally, questions about what is deemed responsible or irresponsible behaviour in relation to waste management will be addressed.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores everyday beliefs and actions involving plastics in Cambridge and Montevideo. It highlights how the avoidance of littering continues to dominate ideas of good plastic conduct in Uruguay, while appropriate ethical plastic behaviour includes consumption, use and disposal in the UK.
Paper long abstract:
Enthusiastic calls to ‘tackle the plastics problem’ often conjure societies that are ‘in it together’, flattening out responsibility and ignoring entrenched power dynamics. The current plastics zeitgeist is characterised by concern and experimentation at legislative, scientific, commercial, and household levels yet often without challenging underlying logics and mechanisms of production and consumption. This paper explores everyday beliefs and actions involving plastics in Cambridge (England) and Montevideo (Uruguay). Research was conducted with ten households in each city and additional ethnographic research was carried out with volunteer repair and clean-up groups. Research participants were asked to keep a ‘plastics diary’ detailing consumption, use, and disposal of plastic as I sought to understand how plastic has been problematised in each site and where the locus of responsibility for problem solving was situated. In both sites, research participants differentiated between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ plastics, with the material properties that distinguished good plastic products – e.g. durability and strength – often the same that cause problems when they are released into (marine) environments. Yet while in Montevideo plastic was often framed as an aesthetic-environmental problem of littering, in Cambridge ideas of appropriate ethical behaviour around plastics were dispersed over a range of consumption and disposal activities, including avoidance, sharing, and recycling. The paper explores whether this difference was due to the greater availability of infrastructures for non-plastic consumption and recycling in the UK or whether Montevideans were more inclined to direct the blame for plastic pollution at wider structures beyond the unit of household consumption.
Paper short abstract:
Agile response-ability to plastic materials is evolving in a vanguard spread across households. Responses to plastic in everyday practices produce interventions in plastic material flows, and also instances of ethico-political economy with implications beyond responsibility for plastics.
Paper long abstract:
Response-ability to plastic materials is far more agile in a vanguard spread across households, driven by felt responsibilities and concerns, than in policy-making. In the Australian context, as in most countries, plastics are ubiquitous in household provisioning practices. My project seeks to identify and map responses to plastic in everyday engagements, alterations and interventions which trouble and reconstitute human-plastic relations at the household level, forming ‘anti-plastic’ ethical-political responses to the flow of plastic materials through and around households. These responses are often efforts of caring, variously for the household, the environment, descendants, the future, and beyond. A striking aspect of anti-plastic responses is their broader or ‘flow-on’ influences in people’s lives. Many aspects of these flow-on effects can be seen as producing instances of an ethico-political economy, which extends beyond simple (dis-)engagement with plastic materials. This is an economy in which responses to plastic can see provisioning practices become mindful or playful or challenging, can initiate gardens, can trigger family bonding experiences, can privilege community-scale relations, as well holding the potential to be draining, frustrating or upsetting. It is an economy shaped by ethical and political concerns, without clear association with cohesive ethical campaigns or group politics. Anti-plastic ethical-political responses to plastics constitute hopeful steps towards overcoming the intractability of plastic. They intervene in specific material flows and make imaginable different ways of living with plastic, but also contribute to the development of dispersed instances of ethico-political economy with implications beyond responsibility for plastics.
Paper short abstract:
Plastic 'contamination' in Kaata, Bolivia comprises a ‘weakening’ of the land and indexical human bodies, intimately connected across scale in cycles of reponsability. Plastic waste entails the concept of modernity, presenting a conceptual transformation in a reciprocal landscape cycling use values.
Paper long abstract:
Contamination in the village of Kaata, highland Bolivia comprises a simultaneous ‘weakening’ of the land as waste is littered onto it, or of the air when it is burnt, and of human bodies that consume the goods these wrappers contain. This is a world in which humans and non-humans are indexical, intimately connected across scale in cycles of ‘reponsability’, but despite this, not one in which consumer waste contamination can be evaded. Young peoples’ desires for goods unobtainable in the subsistence economy of the village continue to drive a process of capitalisation which many villagers believe will end in cataclysm, an uprising of the animate elements to re-balance the cycles of exchange in this reciprocal landscape.Plastic waste and batteries were initially assumed to be fertiliser, like animal waste products, nourishing the land; however government workshops shockingly taught villagers that these substances cannot circulate in the subsistence farming oicos that until recently required no external inputs nor produced anything without a use value. Here the language of 'modernity' is introduced to classify today's world with its useless waste in contrast to the 'natural' past, connoting the end of cycles of sufficiency connecting humans and non-humans in a ceaseless reciprocity of use-values. Plastic often replaces the woven goods synonymous with 'our culture' in this village of textile weavers, whilst batteries power the stereos which young people favour above the traditional music played for the elements and fertility of the land, comprising a key element in the transformation of this Andean 'cosmoscape'.