schaffer_project_hopping_


 * TOPICAL AREA? || Privatization of U.S. Waste System || Composting movement in Troy || Dumpster diving ||
 * DATA SETS? || Discourse analysis of literature from private and public recyclers, composters; statistics on who hauls how much in the U.S.; interviews with private waste companies; historical analysis of early pay landfills. || Participant action/observation at meetings; interviews with organizers; maps of neighborhood scale system; inputs and outputs of neighborhood piles; educational materials produced for compost system; logs of TroyCompost wikispaces; journals form taking master composter course. || Participant observation/interviews with dumpster divers, autoethnography of personal experiences dumpster diving, personal observations of trash on sidewalk, in trash cans/dumpsters, discourse analysis of dumpster diving zines (etc) from Crimethink and Food Not Bombs, and legal cases involving the raiding of trash cans. ||
 * SOCIAL THEORETICAL QUESTIONS? || How do private and public utlilities differ, and what are their effects on the people/environments they serve? Is there a difference between the environmental and social impacts of services runby the state and those run for profit? How has the U.S. waste system changed in neoliberalism? || How do environmental movements acquire expertise about local conditions, develop critiques, and model new ways of wasting? How do people get included/excluded from these discussions, and what are the imaginaries of democratic governance in these discussions? What alternatives are available to the U.S. waste system, and what would "waste stewardship" look like on the city level? How do communities institute systems? || How is the taboo around interacting with waste maintained and broken? How are these breakdowns where waste becomes resource built into and accommodated by the waste system, and where are the barriers between waste and resource weakest? Who engages in dumpster diving, and how do attitudes toward trash among middle-class college students, punx, and homeless people interact? ||
 * WHY NOW? || Because large-scale changes in resource management are moving in troubling directions; because sustainability discourse possesses marketable salience; because there appears to be a nationwide shift in resource management, new agencies are being formed, and it’ll be interesting to examine how new practices congeal. || Because this movement is happening now and I am involved; because waste continues to threaten human and environmental health; because bourgeois environmental activism will always be a process that is both laudable and problematic, and in need of questioning and improvement; because local food/urban agriculture movements make organic waste particularly salient as a social problem || Because movements that reframe waste as resource take place both at the levels of policy and social movement, but waste-as-resource is a frame that has been employed by poor, homeless, hungry or bored people since time immemorial. ||
 * HOW PREPARED? || Waste activism chops grant me legitimacy to environmentally-minded waste managers, and already have helpful contacts in the industry; some awareness of history of waste system and theoretical debates over ecological modernization, waste regimes. || Helped write the report on which this current movement is based; I chair a committee; these people are my friends || Have extensive experience eating trash; have friends with expertise in eating trash; know of several spots in downtown Troy with good dumpsters that people eat from ||
 * BIAS? || I fear green capitalism and instinctively distrust private resource recovery organizations; at the same time I favor closed loops of production and feel that there is some desirability in these efforts... || I am invested in creating a composting system in Troy; these activists are my friends and collaborators, so too harsh a critique of them would make me feel mean. || I think garbage is delicious; I have middle-class guilt when I think about taking food from dumpster divers who lack resources. ||
 * FIELDS OF WORK? || Ecological modernization, urban planning, discard studies, neoliberalism, history of cities, ecological economics || Social movements, participatory technology assessment, expertise, ecological modernization, deliberative democracy, democratic governance of new technologies, practice theory possibly || Discard studies, urban studies, food systems ||
 * FUNDERS || EPA, US Composting Council, historical work might be fund-able through small grants by interested waste organizations... || EPA, variety of small grants for learning about public engagement, US Composting Council?, NAS || NAS, RPI, people who buy my zine. ||