Wastescapes: Managing Excess in the Twentieth-Century United States

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

U.S. consumer markets have produced ever-increasing volumes of waste for more than a century. At the same time, the ways that waste circulates and settles—in bodies, atmospheres, and the land—have become increasingly complex and hard to trace. Indeed, the nature of waste has changed, from a source of home heating fuel and fertilizer to something thrown “away”; from the stuff of scrap economies to bulk commodities in global circuits; from something biodegradable to something volatile and persistent.

This interdisciplinary panel will explore imaginaries and infrastructures that defined waste in the twentieth century and beyond. Our panelists interrogate the very category of waste and the broader operative notions of worth and value that inform it. They trace production-consumption relations, the emergence of waste management systems, and the role of waste crises in shaping landscapes at local and planetary scales. They also consider paths less taken, including the cooperative approach to “production for use,” along with standard practices from the not-so-distant past, such as recycling garbage as food for swine.

This panel is sponsored by the ASEH’s Early Career Caucus.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Where the Dumps That Used to Be Ponds Used to Be - Samia Willow Cohen, Brown University

• Economies of Need - Eve O'Connor, Harvard University

• The San Francisco Transfer Station and the Alienation of Domestic Discards - Maximillian Clee, Boston University

• "The County Should Look at Solid Waste as a Resource": Charting Southern California's Trade in Trash - James Bradley, The University of Chicago

Discussant

• Dawn Biehler, University of Maryland, Baltimore County