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Diversification of Waste: Production of Value?

Sun, April 19, 8:15 to 9:45am, Virtual Room

Abstract

Waste has geographies which determine and characterize its connections to people, places, things, and matter (see Cantor, 2017; Hawkins & Muecke, 2002). Both matter and waste-matter have material, political, and biopolitical consequences for places, humans, and non-humans. “Waste can thus be understood as a paradox and a boundary material; defining something as “waste” involves drawing a boundary line around what is valuable” (Cantor, 2017, p. 1219). It also produces epistemological insights into human’s relationship with objects and matter (see also Hird, 2012). Waste has its value, materiality, process in its difference in time and place. Waste also carries both value and non-value in different academic contexts.

In this paper we associate the potential value of waste with waste’s generative diversification processes, namely: accumulations of waste (e.g., sedimentation, fermentation, and preservation), time and spatialization of waste (e.g., creation, expiration, age), and functionalities of waste (purpose, use, functional dimensions). We also argue that the value and waste itself is not a singular concept but the multiplicity and ongoing diversification of waste contributes to the future potential and infinite usefulness of waste here and in the future. We draw examples from Academia especially focusing on the academic waste including thought waste, written waste, time waste, biological waste, relational waste, collaborative waste, digital waste, information waste, and many unidentifiable and unrecognizable forms of waste. We experimented with waste value in Academia not only in our own settings but also in a conference context.

During our lived experience and experimentation with waste – we became and unbecame waste, multiplied into it and with it, and multiplied it. While thinking and discussing diversity of waste, types of waste, we discovered multiple directions, however, instead of choosing one we decided to play with directionality(ies). We moved beyond categorizing and representing waste, we related to it and let it un-become. We didn’t recycle it, sort it, limit it, or compile it. We engaged with its messiness, invisibility, shapes and piles. We danced with it, talked to it, had unpleasant silent moments with it, connected and chaotically touched. What might waste do? What it isn’t? Do we possess it? Or are we possessed by waste(d)values?

Using the waste materials, and drawing from Thill (2015), Massumi (2018), and Bauman (2004), we interrogate the conditionality of waste respective of time, the ways in which waste is ordered and reordered, and a reconsideration of capital-value discourse and waste. By doing this we hope to elicit alternative ways to process, consume, and create scholarship outside of the contained, knowable ways so common in Academia.

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