Discard Studies and Environmental Literature

Catalog description

How and why do certain objects, bodily processes, spaces, and persons come to be deemed "waste"? What transformative power, on the other hand, might reside in waste? Drawing from Discard Studies (a new field in the Environmental Humanities), this course will analyze how societal and cultural mechanisms shape definitions of and attitudes toward waste. While critically examining contemporary literature and social thought, we will focus on how waste interacts with broader systems of colonialism, race, gender, and environmental destruction. Anti-colonial and Indigenous perspectives, including scholars like Max Liboiron and Zoe Todd, will be central to our exploration. Students will learn how quotidian hierarchies of matter that we often take for granted can result in infrastructural world-building - and, reorganized, have the capacity for ecological and social renewal.