Organizing Waste for Livable Lives

We live in a world of waste, and increasingly, in a wasting world. Yet waste is unevenly visible across places and peoples. Nuclear waste is sunk deep in the ocean or hidden underground, for future generations to deal with. Industrial, electronic or clothing wastes can be made invisible to dominant social groups, through spatial displacement to other territories. Elsewhere, waste can be stark and sensorially pervasive, shaping everyday lives.

Waste is not an “externality” to capitalist accumulation. It is consubstantial with living bodies and their environments.

This has led a number of scholars across disciplines (sociology, management, geography...) to foreground the multidimensional and processual nature of waste. They conceptualize waste as a process integral to value creation for surplus accumulation, predicated on destroying past, present and future lives, degrading bodies - especially those deemed disposable - and rupturing the metabolic circulation that makes waste part of social and ecological life.

This session calls for contributions that address waste as a purposively organized or unorganized phenomenon. We seek to add to debates on who gets to decide what is waste, how capital accumulates through waste and how it is not only valued and constructed as a category, but also how it is organized, (de/re)territorialized, contested and transformed. What is the role of wars, colonial, settler colonial and imperialist forces in this economic accumulation of waste? We also seek to open discussions on the possibility of alternative relations to waste, and how livable lives can be organized in a wasted world.