Intimate with your junk! A waste management experiment for a material world

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 318-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blanca Callén Moreu ◽  
Daniel López Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Waste Management ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Management Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Everyday Objects ◽  
Material Turn

The material turn in social theory has put the study of objects at the centre of any attempt to comprehend the production of social order, but only recently has their affectivity become an important issue. Even in Science and Technology Studies (STS) where objects have been approached as ‘actants’ that actively participate in the material composition and decomposition of various socio-natural orderings, their affectivity has seldom been explored. Diverse scholars from feminist and STS areas stand out for bringing to the fore the affective entanglements between humans and non-humans as constitutive of various ecologies of knowledge production. Our contribution here aims to pursue this further in relation to practices of maintenance, conservation of, and the discarding of everyday objects. We propose the notion of ‘intimate entanglements’ to explore how objects come to matter to us, what makes us care for them, and how they might become companions and our mutual interdependent supporters. Through an artistic research project called ‘Objections’, we asked participants to donate discarded everyday objects and interrogated them about their reasons for keeping, and the conditions under which they chose to keep and maintain, certain objects, while discarding others. We hoped that the notion of intimate entanglements would enable us to approach various ‘objectual’ biographies as stories of companionship and becoming with these objects, where the self is accounted for as a figure that holds and is affected by encounters with the multiple. The consequences that this material shift may have for the political ecology of waste and maintenance studies will be explored in this article, which promises to elucidate some of the ways that waste management systems operate today and perhaps suggest some alternatives.

scholarly journals Rubbish Justice: A political ecology of Tibar's dumpsite-to-landfill upgrade in Timor-Leste

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Joanna Woodham
Keyword(s):  
Waste Management ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Solid Waste Management ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Management Systems ◽  
The People ◽  
Ability To Act ◽  
Timor Leste

<p>In pursuing significant infrastructural upgrades to solid waste management systems, how do decision-makers balance social safeguarding with wider system improvements? What are the implications for justice, if the people most affected by the development have been providing unrecognised labour within the waste management system? Adopting an intentionally political lens, this thesis presents an analysis of power and justice within the case study of Tibar’s dumpsite-to-landfill upgrade, in Timor-Leste.   This research was conducted at a critical time while the upgrade was developing. Through a political ecology framework, supported by environmental justice, it emerges that there is a disconnect between stakeholders’ and decision-makers’ intentions versus their ability to act on these intentions. Several systemic barriers exist in waste-pickers’ justice being met. In some instances, these barriers constitute such injustices. This thesis further evidences the claim that the impacts of the growing global waste problem are not evenly distributed throughout society.  Tibar dumpsite is established as a political space where the intersection of waste and labour is dynamic and changing, brought to light by the proposed dumpsite-to-landfill upgrade.</p>

scholarly journals Recovering critique in an age of datafication

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 1135-1151
Author(s):  
Nick Couldry
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Questions

This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. Current social science work on datafication has been greatly shaped by the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour, as reflected in the work of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (ANT/STS). The article asks whether this approach, given its philosophical underpinnings, provides sufficient resources for the critical work that is required in relation to datafication. Drawing on Latour’s own reflections about the flatness of the social, it concludes that it does not, since key questions, in particular about the nature of social order cannot be asked or answered within ANT. In the article’s final section, three approaches from earlier social theory are considered as possible supplements to ANT/STS for a social science serious about addressing the challenges that datafication poses for society.

scholarly journals Underground Inscriptions

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Lancione
Keyword(s):  
Waste Management ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Management Systems ◽  
The Political

This essay examines the politics of home in underground Bucharest, and the ways relationships of care among homeless drug users emerge amid everyday violence and exclusion, illuminating the unconventional practices of belonging that take shape in transient communal spaces such as underground electric, transportation, and waste-management systems. The traces of systemic exclusion in these experiences converge in makeshift forms of kinship and care, provoking questions of solidarity, fragility, and the political potential of recognizing such forms through ethnographic collaboration.

scholarly journals Social Order and Political Theology in the Game of Thrones: What Makes the Cult Series Interesting for Theoretical Sociology

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-159
Author(s):  
Oleg Kil'dyushov
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fantasy Novels ◽  
Game Of Thrones

The paper is a review of a number of writings in the humanities and in social science devoted to George Martin’s series of epic fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire, and the television-serial drama Game of Thrones. At the beginning, we analyze the researchers’ most heuristically-fruitful intellectual reactions to Game of Thrones, that is, specific products such as texts that may be of interest to social theory. The main part of the article considers the institutional and discursive order of George Martin’s saga through the research lens of the classics of modern social theory, such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Max Weber. The paper then briefly touches upon the religious situation in Westeros, whose system of values and norms is paradoxically characterized by both post-secularism and a surge of religious fundamentalism. As a next step, it analyzes the political theology in the Game of Thrones, which is considered within the perspective of a transcendental legitimization of politics as proposed by Carl Schmitt. In conclusion, the paper considers Westeros’ cognitive landscape which consists of various competing epistemic sets (maesters, septons, white walkers, etc.), and structurally reproduces the situation in the societies of late modernity.

Arendt, role theory and the ethical evaluation of action

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kieran Bonner
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Role Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reflexive Sociology

In what way can social action be simultaneously inquired into and ethically evaluated by social theory? This paper explores the responsibility sociology has with regard to the political and ethical implications of its knowledge production and does so through a case study examination of the sociological concept of role. It compares and evaluates the different orientations that ground the concept of role and Arendt’s concept of action, which is then expanded to address the critique of the social sciences by theorists like Arendt and Foucault. The paper engages a particular tradition of reflexive sociology in the context of the danger of banal evil (Eichmann) and in the context of modern structures of domination that makes that danger more prevalent. Arguing that a theoretical non-empirical reflexivity is called for, and drawing on the phenomenological reflexivity of Berger and the constitutive reflexivity of Blum and McHugh, the paper seeks to demonstrate the need for a reflexive awareness of the actor’s responsibility for action and the theorist’s responsibility for formulating action that can make conceptual space for reasoned evaluation oriented by and to principle.

The Revenge of the Humanities: Reality, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Postmodernism

1995 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Ward
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Organizational Strategies ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
The Status

The debate between scientific realists and postmodern relativists has been generally treated as a philosophical disagreement over the status of epistemology. Here, however, I use material from Bourdieuian social theory and science and technology studies to illustrate how both scientific realism and postmodern deconstructionism can be seen as political and organizational strategies used in the historical and ongoing struggle between scientific and literary fields and camps. I argue that just as scientific realism and experimentalism were used to dismiss the knowledge contributions of literary fields and to relegate them to secondary status in the seventeenth century, postmodern deconstructionism and its turn to rhetoric and textualism is now being employed as a strategy to counter the political and intellectual dominance gained by the sciences over the last few centuries.

scholarly journals Ecosystem approaches to health and knowledge-to-action: towards a political ecology of applied health-environment knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben W. Brisbois ◽  
Andrés Burgos Delgado ◽  
Douglas Barraza ◽  
Óscar Betancourt ◽  
Donald Cole ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Knowledge Framework ◽  
Knowledge To Action ◽  
Ecosystem Approaches

Abstract Political ecology pushes back against the apolitical and ahistorical ecologies frequently found in mainstream scientific accounts of nature and the environment, and has increasingly focused on how scientific knowledge is 'socially constructed.' In this article, we argue for political ecological engagement with the highly influential knowledge-to-action (KTA) movement in science about health and the environment. We introduce KTA using results of a survey conducted under the auspices of a Canada-Latin America-Caribbean 'ecosystem approaches to health' (ecohealth) collaboration, and then narrow our focus to a single illustrative ecohealth project, dealing with the health impacts of small-scale gold mining in southwestern Ecuador. We employ an ecology of knowledge framework for integrating insights from science and technology studies,illustrating the interacting actors, material artifacts, institutions and discourses involved in not only the generation but also the application of health-environment science. The origins of ecohealth research in the Americas reflect interacting epistemological and political factors, as sophisticated, complex systemic analyses of health-environment interactions occurred amidst increasing neoliberalization of knowledge production. Simultaneously, corporate actors such as large mining companies influenced both the distribution of healthdamaging environmental conditions in the Americas, and the ways in which they were studied. This analysis motivates our advocacy of specifically political ecologies of health-environment knowledge, in which inequitable power dynamics and non-human actors are foregrounded in studies of the social production and application of science. The political ecology of knowledge framework that we envision would allow for simultaneous consideration of how societal contexts influence scientific knowledge production, and how the resulting knowledge can be better applied to protect the health of communities facing environmental injustice. Key words: ecohealth; mining; praxis; science and technology studies; knowledge-to-action; Canada; Ecuador

scholarly journals Rubbish Justice: A political ecology of Tibar's dumpsite-to-landfill upgrade in Timor-Leste

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Joanna Woodham
Keyword(s):  
Waste Management ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Solid Waste Management ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Management Systems ◽  
The People ◽  
Ability To Act ◽  
Timor Leste

<p>In pursuing significant infrastructural upgrades to solid waste management systems, how do decision-makers balance social safeguarding with wider system improvements? What are the implications for justice, if the people most affected by the development have been providing unrecognised labour within the waste management system? Adopting an intentionally political lens, this thesis presents an analysis of power and justice within the case study of Tibar’s dumpsite-to-landfill upgrade, in Timor-Leste.   This research was conducted at a critical time while the upgrade was developing. Through a political ecology framework, supported by environmental justice, it emerges that there is a disconnect between stakeholders’ and decision-makers’ intentions versus their ability to act on these intentions. Several systemic barriers exist in waste-pickers’ justice being met. In some instances, these barriers constitute such injustices. This thesis further evidences the claim that the impacts of the growing global waste problem are not evenly distributed throughout society.  Tibar dumpsite is established as a political space where the intersection of waste and labour is dynamic and changing, brought to light by the proposed dumpsite-to-landfill upgrade.</p>

Thinking with a Feminist Political Ecology of Air-and-breathing-bodies

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irma Kinga Allen
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Feminist Political Ecology ◽  
Public Health Crisis

Social theory has paid little attention to air, despite its centrality to bodily existence and air pollution being named the world’s biggest public health crisis. Where attention to air is found, the body is largely absent. On the other hand, conceptualizing the body without life-sustaining breath fails to highlight breathing as the ongoing metabolic bodily act in which the materiality of human and more-than-human intermingle and transmute one another. Political ecology studies how unequal power structures and knowledge production reproduce human–environment relations, including a nascent focus on the body and air – but as separate issues. This article argues that a political ecology of air would productively fuse with a political ecology of the body to bring the visceral realm into intersectional analysis of air’s contemporary materialities. A feminist political ecology situates explicitly air-and-breathing-bodies, their intimately posthuman, relational, elemental and corpomaterial intra-action, at the heart of such analysis.

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