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- Convenor:
-
Rebecca Carlson
(Toyo University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussants:
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Ryo Morimoto
(Princeton University)
Marije Miedema (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Stephanie Ketterer Hobbis (Wageningen University)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Junk is potential, a state of transformation. Junk is not trash, although it can be. Junk is that object or person which can be moved between regimes of value, but not always easily. Junk describes, not the thing itself, but the sociocultural categories of worth we apply to, or frame onto, things.
Long Abstract:
This panel argues that the concept of junk can be a productive way to collate acts of disintegration and repair, removal and reformatting—which make up so much of our technologically-mediated everyday lives—as all part of the same transformative process. Theoretically, we tend to figure technological breakdown as an exception to the norm, and position trash and waste as part of a linear movement into uselessness. Yet, this can erase attention to acts of repurposing (what’s been thrown away) and the continued evolution of things that have been trashed, the new life that springs from rot. Junk on the other hand has been used to describe a more nonlinear state of potential, a possibility for things to be moved between regimes of value. It describes, not the thing or person itself, but the sociocultural categories of worth/lessness we apply to, or frame onto, these. Junk can help researchers ask specifically about the formulations of power which define purity and value in the first place, and the forms of labour that are given over to the maintenance or disassembly of things. Junk can help us interrogate sociotechnical imaginations of efficiency, neoliberal self-making and the good working order, and draw attention back to reuse and renewal which capitalist mechanisms work on us to forget. In this panel, junk is an invitation to explore the productive, yet often made invisible, cycles of technologic dis/use and dis/repair. We will use the concept of junk to ask how things are made into trash and under what conditions they may be reclaimed; how the things themselves resist or settle these categorizations as out of our hands; and to draw out the other multi-species possibilities and potentials which linger in trash heaps.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Ishani Saraf
Short abstract:
This presentation will draw on the display cultures of a scrap market in Delhi, India to present a situated and particular archive and sense of technological experimentation, labor, and the city by whose who create "scrap" - techno-commercial entities that emerge from the dismantling of machines.
Long abstract:
India’s capital city, Delhi, is home to one of the country's largest scrap metal markets. Here, discarded industrial and automotive machines are gathered, dismantled, cleaned, piled, segregated and transformed into scrap, parts, and other kinds of commodities that are sold. Its networks reach far beyond the city, across land and sea. I posit the scrap market as an experimental space and phenomenal site to engage with alternative histories of technological inquiry and experimentation and as a space of legitimate work and trade. Drawing on the display cultures of the market, I explore the aesthetics of expertise, the conveyance of excess, the display of inventory, and invocations of affect through the description of different visual structures and forms present throughout the market. These present a particular archive and sense of the city created by those who labor to create “scrap”, techno-commercial entities that blur the boundary between production and consumption, between work and trade, and between raw material, commodity, and waste. I explore how these visual arrangements interrogate notions of belonging, pollution, innovation, power, and possibilities for the continuous (re)making of the city. Scrap and its transformation and trade provides fertile ground to think alongside junk and its manifestations in the global south.
Annaclaudia Martini (University of Bologna)
Short abstract:
My contribution aims at analysing narratives around the debris created after the 2011 triple disaster in northeastern Japan: as much debris was concealed or eliminated, certain core items have gone trough a process of value-production, and have turned from trash to post-disaster heritage markers.
Long abstract:
My contribution aims at analysing narratives around the debris created after the 2011 triple disaster in northeastern Japan: as much debris was concealed or eliminated, certain core items have gone trough a process of value-production, and have turned from trash to post-disaster heritage markers. The triple disaster that happened in 2011 in Japan produced not only an unimaginable amount of debris, trash, junk, but also ideologically and politically oriented narratives about said junk, which reflected a vision of a (imagined) community. As Brian Thill notes in Waste, “there is no human-made object so well-traveled, so ambient, as waste” (2015, 3). By analysing media narratives developed around the debris created by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the Tohoku region of Japan, which has traveled for years and hundreds of kilometers, reaching foreign shores. In this context, my presentation looks at how, at an affective level, the process of “valuing junk” through governmental-friendly media narratives differentiate between items that need to be removed, and items that need to be “un-junked”, and memorialized. Indeed, when talking about junk, waste, and debris, while one concern relates to the processes occurring at the bottom of the value chain academics need also to consider how things identified as devoid of value ought to be understood as social constructs grounded in place, thereby indicating how different matters matter differently.
Anais Bloch (HEAD, Geneva HES-SO)
Short abstract:
Based on an ethnographic study, we will examine amateur re-use of digital rubbishes (smartphones, tablets, computers). We will describe the material, aesthetic, technical and pedagogical opportunities offered by this type of junk.
Long abstract:
Behind digital worlds and information and communication technologies lie a mass of infrastructures, networks, systems and physical, tangible equipment. This material, with its increasingly limited lifespan, is constantly being replaced. Faced with the growing quantity of electronic waste, new directives are emerging to prevent the accumulation of this waste and promote recovery, recycling and repair. While these projects are necessary, they have certain shortcomings, not least because they are essentially designed from a "top-down" perspective (Callen, 2016). It therefore seems important to look for other ways of dealing with electronic waste.
Through the presentation of a case study from an ethnographic survey we are conducting on the amateur reuse of digital waste, our contribution attempts to show that there are underestimated material, aesthetic, technical and pedagogical opportunities in digital waste. At the crossroads of the anthropology of waste, Discard Studies and digital DIY, our project examines the various reuse techniques implemented by collectives, associations and individuals (artists, DIY enthusiasts).
In order to grasp these different forms of reuse, we will describe ways of counteracting (Allard, 2015) with second-hand electronic objects, without overshadowing the different states of transformation of waste and its changing status. Our aim is to show that through the transformation of digital waste it is possible to invent sustainable technological immagination that are more convivial (Illich, 1973).
Sandro Simon (University of Cologne)
Short abstract:
Gleaning for the remainder is predicated on an agreement of benevolence and marginality. Both confirming and decentering hierarchies, gleaning invokes the possibilities of life entwined in racialised and gendered dispossession and ruination while redescribing value, property and labour.
Long abstract:
Gleaning describes the right of the subaltern to the remainder and the obligation of the dominant to produce and/or allow access to the remainder under the premise of marginality. This paper introduces gleaning trans-culturally and focuses on two examples from the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal. The first inquires how gleaning for molluscs safeguards deltaic waters as a female sphere by appeasing ancestral guardian spirits who 'gift' molluscs and by evoking a longstanding female subalternity and norms of benevolence and mutual aid. This also obscures the profitability of gleaning. At the same time, gleaning allows women to eschew labour relations introduced e.g. by NGO projects. The second example inquires how deltaic deck hands gleaned molluscs from the bycatch of industrial trawlers. By performing the marginality of this bycatch while redescribing its value and exchanging it along female networks, they realised their own gains from it, renegotiated ownership and possession as well as labour, and turned trawlers from capitalist- into peri-capitalist sites. Gleaning as what I term a ‘minor tactic’ thus creates distinct, if entwined minor niches within hierarchical socio-economic relations and their dynamics of dispossession and ruination. It is a fragile practice characterized by indeterminacy and limits requiring close attention to changing environmental and socio-economic contexts. It simultaneously confirms and decenters hierarchical relations, while figuring as a larger promise that questions the establishment of property and value and the character of work/labour and its alienation from the environment. As such it also allows for a heuristic beyond both romanticisation and victimisation.
Livia Kampff (University of Coimbra) Gonçalo Santos (University of Coimbra)
Short abstract:
This article analyzes the impact of the Zero Waste Movement in Brazil, with a focus on the promotion of composting and the influence of the “Composteiros do Brasil” network. We also discuss the challenges and progress of the ongoing socio-technical transition in the country's waste management.
Long abstract:
Currently, global production of municipal solid waste amounts to 2.01 billion tons, with a disastrous growth estimate for 2050 of 3.40 billion tons (World Bank 2018). This trend towards a growing volume of waste is unsustainable and has long been criticized by environmental social movements critical of the cradle-to-grave model of contemporary throwaway economies. The zero waste movement (ZWM) is one such transnational movement and its main goal is to create an economic system that avoids sending trash to landfills, incinerators, oceans, or any other part of the environment. This paper explores the history and the impact of the ZWM in Brazil through the lens of larger STS discussions on socio-technical transitions. We show how the ZWM in Brazil, associated with local business solutions, has managed to trigger significant socio-technical change in the system of consumption and disposal of organic waste in major urban centers. Our discussion centers on zero waste strategies for promoting composting over discarding, and we give the example of the network “Composteiros do Brasil” (Composters of Brazil), a decentralized organization made up of a hundred composting companies across the country. This network appears to be challenging the hegemonic system of organic waste disposal and management, leading to the emergence of an alternative ensemble that favors composting over sending organic waste to landfills, thus producing significant changes in the final destination of this type of waste. In the conclusion, we discuss some of the limitations of these changes and identify a few challenges ahead.