schaffer_abstracting_thrice

While questions about the impact of green capitalism on societies, environment and market are generating productive debates over the nature of ecological modernization, the relationship between environmentalism and affect in the contemporary market remains relatively undertheorized. How does eco-preneurship, green-washing, and the marketization of nature interact with feelings? Is there a price for feeling good about your ecological impact?
 * Affect in the green market **

With the privatization of the U.S. waste stream and the marketization of “green” methods of disposal, //waste affect// is emerging as a new commodity: compost, e-waste, and recycling collection companies can make waste producers feel good about disposal—at a price. Waste affect seems to have an impact: warm fuzzy feelings about diverting trash from landfills and incinerators mobilizes resource recovery businesses and waste reduction practices. How has positive waste affect become a selling point for waste management, and how do consumers take it up? What hope is there for a society of happy waste generators, and who gets to benefit from the joys of zero-waste? This paper combines discourse analysis of marketing materials from food scraps composting programs and interview data from customers of a new food scraps collection program to depict the construction of a new way of relating to waste emotionally, and to question the relevance of feelings to an emergent waste market and a compounding waste problem.
 * Garbage is a Feeling: Emergent Waste Affects in a Throw-a-yay! Society**

While Discard Studies has emerged as a productive place for analyzing the social construction and material agency of waste in all its forms, it remains a disparate field, bringing together garbage collectors, radioactive waste dumps, trash islands and public health crises, with little theoretical commonalities or shared methodologies. Given that wasting is a vital (if often invisible) element of social life, what sorts of conceptual offerings can come out of its careful study? Or is it fitting that the study of trash heaps be comprised of disconnected, thematically separate contributions from different sorts of disciplines without any unifying theory? In this panel, scholars of trash come together to examine the concepts and questions that discard studies offers to other aspects of social science.
 * Revisions of Excess**

Building on the success of recycling programs in the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. waste system is embracing and institutionalizing new means of reframing waste as resource: e-waste recycling, composting, anaerobic digestion, etc. While the frame of waste-as-resource is gaining a new kind of traction in waste management, it is also finding new adherents among social movement actors and not-for-profit farming organizations. This paper examines the efforts of a waste reform movement in Troy, NY, to implement a food-scraps composting system in their town. Within the context of this movement, how do activists develop and build on their trash and the trash of others? This paper argues that the activists are developing a model of //waste stewardship//, which can be placed in opposition to a waste market, in that it values the process of extracting utility from waste, stresses the importance locality and personal relationship with trash, and questions the involvement of waste markets in processes of excess production that have built other parts of the U.S. waste stream.
 * Love in the Heap: Waste Stewardship and the Care of Compost**

Public involvement in environmental governance… In this session, a variety of views on the often-strained interactions between
 * Science, environment, and publics**

Trash is a classic site for social movement organization around science, technology, and the environment, with a history that generally aims to move waste toward anywhere but your backyard or gutter. Little is written about efforts on the parts of social movements to keep their waste, though environmental movements occasionally put radical counter-proposals to out-of-sight-out-of-mind waste regimes forward. In this case study, a movement calling for a restructuring of the waste system of a city in upstate New York launches situated critiques of waste practices and the development of an ethic of “waste stewardship” that keeps waste local and useful through a networked, neighborhood-based composting system. Through participant action research, interviews with activists, and historical analysis of local waste systems, this paper articulates the imaginaries of waste stewardship embraced by this group, and situates their work in a broader arena of shifting boundaries between waste and resource, social movement and green business, public service and community project.
 * Precious Trash: Struggles over Banana Peels in a Community-Oriented Waste System**