schaffer_draft_overview


 * Draft Overview**

What if waste in the US is in need of care, not management?

This study aims to characterize a particular node of resistance to/in the contemporary US waste regime, and situate these compost activists in broader shifts in the social, cultural, and technological framework of waste. Through this characterization, it will generate new knowledge about the changing imaginaries of waste governance in play at the national and regional levels, while also examining the processes of critique and resistance that take place on these levels. It will elicit articulations of //waste stewardship// from the compost activists and from waste managers.

The organizing project of the study is in participant action research with the compost activists, //Troy Compost//. By working alongside these activists, I will be able to mobilize critiques of waste policy and culture and implement alternate formulations of waste systems. In addition to this work, discourse analysis of waste policy literature, interviews with resource management officials and businesspeople, historical and mapping work on waste streams, and quasi-journalistic investigations of glitches in the waste regime (those spots where waste systems are made not just visible but newsworthy) will help to characterize shifts in the contemporary waste regime toward public-private partnerships and resource recovery. In organizing around the compost activists, I am to find a position in which I can problematize and critique the current waste regime while situating resistance in bourgeois activism and the marketization of waste.

Ethnographic data on the compost activists will be gathered in Troy, NY, through involvement at meetings, semi-structured interviews with activists, and participant observation at compost piles and education sessions. Semi-structured interviews with waste managers will take place largely over the phone; historical materials and policy documents will be obtained both from the EPA and from local DEC offices. Waste glitches will be investigated through unstructured interviews and site visits.

For years, the US has notably produced more waste than any other nation, at a higher per-capita rate than most. While ethics of waste management are shifting slowly towards diversion, recycling, and management of the wasting subject, it’s possible that waste stewardship could offer a better approach, as a means of rendering waste visible and caring for waste in a conscientious way.

The study will build on the expertise of researcher Guy Schaffer, who has been working with waste activists in Troy and elsewhere for the past year, and has established connections with resource management officials across the country. He has been conducting in-depth reviews of the literatures on participatory governance of sociotechnical systems; science, technology and social movements; and discard studies. He recycles unceasingly.