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Labor Laid Waste: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Waste Work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2019

Jacob Doherty  and
Kate Brown
Jacob Doherty
Affiliation:
School of Geography and the Environment – University of Oxford
Kate Brown
Affiliation:
Program in Science, Technology, and Society – Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Abstract

Waste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of labor history, and what, in turn, a focus on labor history affords to social science research on waste. We examine the relationship between surplus populations and surplus materials, the location of waste work at the ambiguous fulcrum of trash and value, and the significance of labor for the understanding of infrastructure.

Type
Articles
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 95: Labor Laid Waste , Spring 2019 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2019 

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References

Notes

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45. Thanks to Josh Reno for this observation, made in conversation during the panel “Living and Dying with Waste Infrastructure” at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

46. While this theme is not central to this issue, waste work, in fact, extends well beyond human labor, including the work of cart-pulling horses, trash eating pigs and birds, garbage decomposting bacteria, and more. See: Jacob Doherty, “Trash Eaters: Kampala's Animal Infrastructure,” Feral Atlas, forthcoming; Hoag, Colin, Bertoni, Filippo, and Bubandt, Nils, “Wasteland Ecologies: Undomestication and Multispecies Gains on an Anthropocene Dumping Ground - Dimensions,” Journal of Ethnobiology 38 (2018): 88–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reno, Joshua, “Toward a New Theory of Waste: From ‘Matter out of Place’ to Signs of Life,” Theory, Culture & Society 31 (2014): 3–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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54. For examples of research on these organizations, see: Ogando, Ana Carolina, Roever, Sally, and Rogan, Michael, “Gender and Informal Livelihoods: Coping Strategies and Perceptions of Waste Pickers in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 37 (2017): 435–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gutberlet, Jutta, “Informal and Cooperative Recycling as a Poverty Eradication Strategy,” Geography Compass 6 (2012): 19–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fergutz, Oscar et al. , “Developing Urban Waste Management in Brazil with Waste Picker Organizations,” Environment and Planning 23 (2011): 597–608Google Scholar; Bjerkli, Camilla, “Governance on the Ground: A Study of Solid Waste Management in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (2013): 1273–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Poornima Chikarmane, “Integrating Waste Pickers into Municipal Solid Waste Management in Pune, India,” WIEGO Policy Bried (Urban Policies) (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Fahmi, Wael and Sutton, Keith, “Cairo's Contested Garbage: Sustainable Solid Waste Management and the Zabaleen's Right to the City,” Sustainability 2 (2010): 1765–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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