Waste, Environmental Politics and Dis/Engaged Publics
Waste is a major global environmental issue that assembles socio-cultural and bio-geological processes in complex indeterminate relationships. Drawing on three case studies, this article explores the shifting environmental politics concerned with waste’s material, economic, political, and cultural ‘...
| Published in: | Theory, Culture & Society |
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| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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SAGE Publications
2015
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276414565717 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0263276414565717 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full-xml/10.1177/0263276414565717 |
| Summary: | Waste is a major global environmental issue that assembles socio-cultural and bio-geological processes in complex indeterminate relationships. Drawing on three case studies, this article explores the shifting environmental politics concerned with waste’s material, economic, political, and cultural ‘management’. The Canadian case studies – determining a new waste management technology in a mid-sized city in central Ontario, an open dump in a remote Nunavut community, and an abandoned gold mine in the Northwest Territories – suggest waste occasions particular material and political mobilizations. Landfill leachate, colonialism, disinterested publics, freezing arsenic, global corporate investments, country food, land claims, neoliberal governance, permafrost, ravens, and a host of other socio-material forces both empower and thwart ‘management’ politics. Through these case studies, this article explores Isabelle Stengers’s assertion that participating citizenship is an ‘Empty Great Idea’, and a provocation to consider the contexts in which waste may generate acquiescent or objecting publics. |
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