schaffer_study


 * Study Components**

At the moment, the bulk of the project consists in **participant observation with compost organizers in Troy**, through my involvement in “Troy Compost” a group of 30-or-so (mostly white, mostly bourgeois) Troy citizens interested in implementing a composting system in Troy, and—moreover—developing a composting //culture// in Troy. This work will involve organizing and attending meetings, assisting in the maintenance of compost piles, car rides with activists, email exchanges with volunteers, and activist engagement in all its time-consuming glory. In doing this, I aim to record how the ideals and goals of Troy Compost are defined, their imaginaries of city planning and democratic participation, their group-forming practices and they come to value different technologies, social structures, business models and materials.

This engagement has already included **informal, un- to semi-structured interviews with waste managers and grassroots compost organizers** in Dubuque, IA, Utica, NY, and Queens NY, in which I performed a preliminary survey of the values of other efforts at changing resource management from different angles. These interviews have snowballed lists of further contacts, and have supported my initial assumption that composting organizations are experiencing unprecedented popularity in other areas.

In the near future, I plan to include **semi-structured interviews with compost activists** in Troy, the **organizers of other resource management organizations** (DPW, composting facilities, private haulers, community compost centers, etc. TBD), and **compost researchers** at Cornell. These interviews will be aimed at eliciting:
 * The political imaginaries and resource-chain imaginaries of compost organizers and waste managers.
 * Ideas about the role of technology and science in the solidly //DIY// realm of composting.
 * Articulations of ideals of //waste stewardship// on the part of municipalities, communities, and individuals.

While compost organizing in Troy has a certain //grass//roots excitement to it, I think it has //other// roots (or at the very least, isomorphisms) in more large-scale changes in waste management (now //resource management//) in the US at the present moment. In order to get a handle on the systemic changes currently taking place, I plan to conduct a **discourse analysis of relevant policy documents and reports**. By collecting materials from the EPA website and (hopefully) gray papers from waste management organizations that are incorporating organics recycling into their operations, I hope to gain a better understanding of how the waste problem is being framed in broader waste/resource management discourse.

The phenomena I’m examining are both national and local; at each level, geography is important to understanding the sorts of resource loops and resource vectors that define the national waste system, and important for navigating this system. At the local level, neighborhood-scale composting can be benefited by **publicly manipulable maps of local compost piles and woodchip heaps**. At the national level, **maps of waste chains** can help to characterize the resource management issues of our current waste regime.

The displacement of materials from the waste stream to a compost stream can take place in a variety of ways, and recovered material may take a variety of forms. Data on this kind of recovery/diversion is found in many different places and in different formats; in order to characterize these phenomena at a national scale, I’ll need to make some effort to **gather quantitative data on “organics diversions” in critical ways**. In putting this data together, I want to be able to pay attention to the end-use of the end-product. Toward this goal, I’d also like to compare preliminary data on the collection and processing of material at Troy Compost sites, and its end-use. I will not just collect grey materials, but the brown and green as well.

In order to do organizing as an academic I’ll need theoretical tools to frame and probe the phenomena taking place at the national scale and at the organizing level; in order to do research as an advocate, I’ll need to be able to build a composting system while still creating constructive knowledge that can be exported elsewhere. Before, after, and while conducting this research, I’ll **review the literature on social studies of waste** (discard studies, sociology of waste, history of waste, etc)**, participatory democracy and social movements** (and the interactions between the two)**, and environmental governance**.

Weaving this all together into a coherent (or at least compelling) narrative/articulation/call to action will take some work. Writing has been an important part of the process so far—not just taking down field-notes but writing them up, examining, trying to relate ideas and phenomena. But in the coming years, I’ll **improve and expand on my writing practice** to include the production of short, digestible texts about this work and about resource management, press releases for Troy Compost and other sorts of useful pieces of writing that don’t fit neatly into a dissertation.