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- Convenors:
-
Patrick O'Hare
(University of St Andrews)
Tridibesh Dey (Wageningen University and Research)
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- Stream:
- Evidence
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 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 Thursday 1 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Our article shows how time in its multiple forms is of key importance in citizens’ engagement with plastics. Therein, four sets of temporal perspectives make tangible how citizens conceptualize plastics-related problems, how responsibility is distributed and how (non-)actions are imagined.
Paper long abstract:
Whilst plastics permeate almost every area of contemporary life, plastics are moving more and more on political and public agendas. In this article, we argue that investigating the complex issue of plastics from a time-sensitive perspective is of key importance for understanding how citizens conceptualize problems, how responsibility is distributed and how (non-)actions are imagined.
After engaging Austrian citizens in several focus groups with the topic of plastics, we identified four main sets of temporal perspectives in participants’ narratives. Each perspectives follows a certain logic and functions differently for their ordering of the relationships between plastics and society. Whilst these temporal perspectives are deeply entangled, we treat them as analytically separate to better understand how they function for citizens’ sense-making of plastics.
The four temporal perspectives range from (1) diagnostic narratives addressing citizens’ visions of contemporary society and its relation to plastics, over (2) present (in)tangibility narratives with reflections of plastics as a slow disaster, (3) justificatory narratives circulating around balancing moralities of usage duration with plastics afterlives, to end with (4) anticipatory narratives and the ways how citizens imagine possible futures with plastics.
Thinking these four temporal narratives on plastics together constitutes what we call Plastic Time(s). Therein, different temporal features embedded in plastic artefacts and society’s functioning co-produced contemporary ways of consuming (with) plastics. Simultaneously, it makes tangible how choreographies and tensions between temporal narratives are creating challenges for the individual citizen to seriously re-think society’s relationship with plastics now and in the future.
Paper short abstract:
To challenge intrusive and shame-based regulatory solutions proposed for the plastics crisis, alternative methodologies for collaborative research are required. With grassroots activists, we show why mapping plastics' local ontologies first should ground and nuance more global campaigns.
Paper long abstract:
Plastics are a material marker of an uneven but global dependence on fossil fuels, contributing to new geographies of terrestrial and marine pollution and producing potentially inequitable impacts on human and non-human health. In response to the emerging materials crisis, we have seen the rapid development of alternative materials, new forms of recycled plastics and recycling technologies, all accompanied by proposed changes in commodity chains and intensified regulation of consumer practices for use and disposal. But these solutions do not fit well when they cross the permeable and problematic boundary from minority to majority world contexts. Relations of power implicit in these regulatory and materials changes emerge in our ongoing collaborations with academics, local government officials, activists and artists living and working in the Cagayan Valley, Luzon, Philippines. Reflecting on the precariousness of knowledge exchange and the space of ethics in and around co-producing local and regional approaches to plastic pollution, our analysis attends to the power assembled and deployed in mitigation strategies and the regulatory construction of the citizen-polluter (Liboiron, 2018) here. Problematising the agency of expert knowledge in majority world contexts, we identify obstacles to multi-disciplinary knowledge construction, illuminate ethical choices behind mitigation approaches, and critique the dominant approach to co-produced participatory citizen science research (Liboiron, 2019). Working from local ontologies to plastics, we suggest alternative methodologies to enable the grassroots activism which both reframes plastic pollution as materialised social inequality and reshapes the intrusive and shame-based regulatory solutions currently proposed.
Paper short abstract:
We follow the EU regulation of oxo-degradable plastics and the justifications of their restriction in the EU market. We attend to how oxo-degradable plastics were imagined as a ‘better alternative’ to conventional plastics and how they failed to get established as such.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper we follow plastics as they become political, not through their everyday use, but through the regulation of plastics in the EU. We use an interpretative and ethnographic approach to policy (Shore, Wright & Pero, 2011) to unpack the moments and frictions where the material and the social are co-constructed and negotiated. In this contribution, we follow oxo-degradable plastics as materials informed by their socio-technical environment (Bensaude-Vincent & Stengers, 1996). Oxo-degradable plastics are made by adding certain chemicals into conventional plastics that promote the oxidation of the material. They have been widely used especially in the production of plastic bags. However, since the EU lightweight plastic carrier bag directive in 2015 the potential environmental harm of these plastics and whether they should be restricted were heavily debated. In 2019, together with the single-use plastics directive which regulates certain plastic products, the use of oxo-degradable plastics was banned in the EU. The restriction of oxo-degradable plastics is mainly based on the argument that they don’t “properly biodegrade” in a “reasonable timeframe” and “fail to deliver a proven environmental benefit”. We unpack how these justifications made oxo-degradable plastics an object of regulation and restriction. We show how regulatory argumentations in the end undermine the assemblage and stabilization of the imaginary of a ‘better alternative’ to conventional plastics and create new valuation and responsibility networks. Considering the promise of new biodegradable plastic materials, and their regulation, investigating these discussions become ever more relevant.
Paper short abstract:
In a transdisciplinary engagement, we will show how objects made of plastic can serve as breaching experiments. We argue that such experiments can help to create new conceptual approaches towards objects at the margin of visibility and help to carefully and responsibly engage with plastic.
Paper long abstract:
Few materials have become debated as widely as plastic. Plastic has transformed from an object that nurtures commodity societies to an unruly object which informs Western capitalist practices, colonial relationships and ecological destruction (Davis 2015; Gabrys et al. 2013). Studies on plastic have reflected on the relationship between nature and artifice (Bensaude-Vincent 2007), conceptions of pollution, harm and affectedness (Liboiron 2016) or consumption, consumerism and responsibilities (Michael 2013). In our talk, we will apply a transdisciplinary approach spanning art and science in order to extend these reflections on plastic objects. Swaantje Güntzel, a conceptual artist, will present one of her artistic works in which objects made of plastic play a central role. As part of her performance, she collects and publicly re-distributes plastic garbage from different origins, e.g. the sea or public places, and creates visibility for former invisible objects. For almost a decade, she has collected the reception of this public performance. Building on Swaantje’s work, Sarah Schönbauer, a science studies scholar, will contextualize her performance as collective breaching experiment. Breaching social practices in which plastic objects are handled and dealt with disrupts cultural norms and expectations, a disruption which allows to analyze and make visible the implicit and explicit knowledge, know-how and daily routines that are part of these practices. In this transdisciplinary engagement, we will argue that breaching experiments with plastic objects can help to create potentially new conceptual approaches towards objects at the margin of visibility and help to carefully and responsibly engage with plastic.