Waste Matters - Single View

Waste is generally understood as the mundane, worthless, redundant and discarded afterwards of how we live our lives. In recent years, however, there has been an increasing scholarly interest in how societies relate to waste. Building on this research, this seminar takes as a starting point the fact that we spend a good amount of time in our ‘ordinary’ lives managing waste, and that the problem of how we manage waste is at the heart of the environmental crisis and the development of more sustainable futures. Exploring that which is rejected, we will investigate waste as a dynamic category that needs to be understood in relation to the modern contexts in which it is most commonly found and transformed, and the relationships in which it is embedded. We will also address contemporary innovative practices of reuse, recycling and re‐purposing. Through such cultures of renewal, waste products not only acquire a new value and function, but they also become entangled in new social relations and material practices. Waste and garbage thus become metonymic devices for conveying crucial insights into contemporary culture.