Wasted: Rethinking Chemical Environments

Catalog description

This senior seminar investigates chemical and other forms of industrially produced waste and its impacts on environment and society. We will take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on scholarship from anthropology, geography, history, sociology, science studies, and discard studies. We will follow chemicals around the world, from their inception in Western laboratories to their disposal in landfills and waste pits of the global South. Along the way, we will consider how corporations engineer chemicals’ manufacture, governments regulate their use, sciences measure their human and ecological effects, and communities contend with the lived realities of chemical exposure and toxic suffering.