Format/Structure

We aim to have 3-4 presenters in this panel, focusing on our intended concepts. We will briefly introduce the analytical concepts and have presenters.

Long Abstract

This panel critically examines waste through the lens of environmental justice. Ever since the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike and the publication of the Toxic Waste and Race report in 1987, waste has been central to the environmental justice movement. In particular, we explore how waste colonialism shapes toxic geographies through inequitable political, economic, and environmental systems. We understand waste not just as an unwanted byproduct but as a set of relations that expose certain lands, bodies, and ecosystems to ongoing harm. Waste systems manage excess in capitalist societies by turning specific places into dumping grounds, often far from where the waste is produced.

We invite contributions that examine how waste is produced, managed, and narrated across different contexts, and how these processes intersect with dimensions of environmental justice. Rather than focusing solely on harm or cleanup, we examine how state, corporate, and scientific institutions structure waste: its materialities, meanings, flows, and who bears its burden.

We highlight slow forms of violence (Davies 2019), community-led science (Ottinger 2013), and Indigenous refusals (Todd 2016) as responses to toxic injustice. We welcome papers that explore how people resist and reimagine waste systems, from legal challenges to alternative environmental practices. We are also interested in how narratives and discourses around waste are constructed, contested, and mobilized.

We ask: How do land and water become treated as waste sinks? How do power and knowledge shape waste systems? Who collects, sorts, and processes waste and under what working conditions ? What forms of resistance emerge in response?

This Panel has 12 pending paper proposals.
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