A Global Era of Disposability: The Anthropocene, The Apotheosis of Waste

Abstract

AbstractThis Symposium explores how under‐examined relations of disposability underpin socio‐ecological transformation in the Anthropocene. The Symposium makes four inventions into ongoing debates at the intersection of discard studies and planetary change. First, it illuminates how new frontiers of accumulation work to revalue discards through shifting waste/value dialectics. Second, it encourages analysis of discards not as incidental of systems and structures but as constitutive, material, processes of maintaining power. Third, it attends closely to waste and its labours in order to illuminate how accumulation is underwritten by embodied precarity. Fourth, it constructively draws out how attention to the politics of discards suggests an ethics of care that is centred on interdependence, accountability, and kinship. Together, the articles demonstrate how an engaged, global study of waste and disposability can not only render the differentiated violences of the current conjuncture visible, but also offer insight into how socio‐material relationships may be revalued.