Temporalities of Waste

"This edited collection addresses the need for ongoing empirical study of and critical reflection on the temporalities of waste in the context of sustainability, materiality, social practices, subjectivity, and environmental challenges. Its contributions are attuned to the multiple temporalities of waste, its circulation and transformation as part of discourses of creative reuse and sharing economies, as well as the ways in which waste lingers and does not move according to cyclical logics and temporalities. Waste is one of the most pressing issues of the day, central to environmental challenges and the development of healthier and more sustainable futures. There is now a large body of research on waste-related topics in existing disciplines like sociology, economics, history, marketing and business, as well as a burgeoning interdisciplinary field of Discard Studies. The emergence of this new field is testament to the centrality of waste as a crucial social, material and cultural problem and to the need for multi- and transdisciplinary approaches like those provided in this volume. This edited collection responds to such concerns, seeking to develop a framework that understands the material properties of different kinds of waste, not as fixed and static but as transformative and relational. It brings together new and cutting-edge research on the temporalities of waste by a diverse range of international authors. Collectively, this research presents a striking and persuasive argument about the need to give more credence to the capacities of waste to provoke us in materially and temporally complex ways, especially those substances that complicate our understandings of life as bounded duration. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, cultural studies, anthropology and human geography"--