Waste as a Critique

Abstract

This volume shows how waste in its manifold variety provides an innovative starting point for interrogating twenty-first-century society. Waste in and of itself, along with those who work with it, may suffer from social stigma. As an epistemological point of departure however, waste offers an advantageous platform for social inquiry. Drawing on the contributions from an international team of interdisciplinary authors from discard and waste studies, this volume showcases the potential for waste as a revelatory lens through which the social world may be critically re-examined and assessed. Among the topics subjected to this critical analysis are anthropocentrism, disposability, economic growth, efficacy, environmental justice, matters of concern, racism, ownership, stigma, social innovation, and techno-utopianism. The contents of this volume elaborate a novel, critical waste-based epistemology that addresses four broad thematic concerns: materiality, society, economy, and temporality. Departing from the ubiquity of what is discarded, rejected, and abandoned, the authors demonstrate how this wide-ranging critical approach challenges ingrained assumptions, categorical inconsistencies, and unconsidered outcomes in social practice and theory. Waste is notoriously unruly. So the critiques that depart from it may be equally inconvenient.