Excess, Leftover, Innovation – call for papers before the 30th of June
“Prospective contributors to a special issue of the journal Techniques & culture (http://tc.revues.org) entitled ‘Fixing the world. Excess, Leftover and Innovation‘ are invited to submit article abstracts before 30 June 2014.
We invite contributions exploring, supplementing, and challenging notions/categories of ‘remainders,’ in the broadest sense (including but not limited to waste), notably the following:
-‘Irreducible’ remainders. The most extreme example of remainders qua elements that resist erosion and biodegradation is probably nuclear waste, but other such insistent externalities include suspended residues/particles such as those that result in atmospheric pollution, or the polymers that, carried by ocean currents and the wind, form gyres in the seas and oceans.
-‘Reused’ leftovers and byproducts. Not all objects that fade into the background of social life become waste. This transition often marks the beginning of the social ‘after-life’ of things. By what processes are objects salvaged? In what places, moments, and organizational configurations do waste objects circulate, are they exchanged and transformed? By what modalities do leftover objects continue existing (re-use) or exist anew (recycling), and what are the social implications of these renewals?
-‘Salvaged’ wastes. What are flows and components, the contours and value chains of actors who glean secondary raw material deposits, on both industrial (extractive industries exploring new forms of ‘urban mining’) and artisanal (the ‘informal’ economy on the margins of large metropolises disassembling and salvaging things like old electric appliances and electronics) scales?
-‘Ghostly’ remains. Not only material objects (including human remains such as the corpse and bones) but also ghosts, spirits, demons and Jinn are the haunt(ed/ing) ruins of a past that, though it gets further and further away, the present never entirely succeeds in detaching itself from. According to Freud the ‘worrying strangeness’ of these ‘familiar demons’ (Das Unheimliche/the uncanny) both attracts and repels us.
-‘Excesses’ and ‘surpluses’. Practices of ostentatious consumption give contemporary society a strange likeness to the potlach ceremony (where prestige is associated not with production but destruction, flowing to the person who throws the most away). Do the (anti)-economic practices of loss and destruction rather than profit and accumulation—festival, sacrifice, luxury, gambling, the market, etc—invite different ways of conceiving of value relations between the material and the immaterial?”
More information here: http://discardstudies.com/2014/05/22/cfp-fixing-the-world-excess-leftover-and-innovation/.
