In response to Carr's article, ‘Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis’, I expl... more In response to Carr's article, ‘Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis’, I explore how repair labour demonstrates the importance of skilled, hands-on labour for responding to times of breakdown and change. Like scholarship on apprenticeship and practical enskilment, repair work demonstrates how labour entails working with the material world and other workers, and hands-on engagement with complex and changing systems. Instead of approaching labour and environmental concerns as separate and often antagonistic, I believe attending to the embodied and relational nature of labour may provide insight on how to work towards a more just socio-environmental future.
In response to Carr's article, 'Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis', I explore ... more In response to Carr's article, 'Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis', I explore how repair labour demonstrates the importance of skilled, hands-on labour for responding to times of breakdown and change. Like scholarship on apprenticeship and practical enskilment, repair work demonstrates how labour entails working with the material world and other workers, and hands-on engagement with complex and changing systems. Instead of approaching labour and environmental concerns as separate and often antagonistic, I believe attending to the embodied and relational nature of labour may provide insight on how to work towards a more just socio-environmental future.
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2017
This paper follows the return of electronic waste back into commodity circuits through widespread... more This paper follows the return of electronic waste back into commodity circuits through widespread processes of reuse, repair and remanufacturing across Delhi, India. Tracing the movements of “waste” from the scrap shop back into secondary use industries, I situate e-waste in India as operating primarily within economies of reuse and repair, rather than waste and recycling. Instead of managing waste, India’s broad reuse industries are production-based, maintaining and making new things out of a diversity of new and used materials. The production of value from used things is dependent on the e-waste trader and the repair worker, who see the potential for seemingly unlimited trajectories of multitudinous conditions and configurations. This view of e-waste from the repair shop (and even the scrap shop) rather than a recycling factory offers a very different rendering of e-waste and particularly informal e-waste labor in the Global South than is presented in policy and popular media. Bui...
If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for pr... more If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for profits is the abstraction of life itself and of the human/nonhuman relations that sustain it, creating a wake of waste in its path. Repairing the fraying human and ecological systems that underwrite life entails ongoing care work that is frequently invisible or devalued, and whose burdens fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations. We detail this through three connected instances: infrastructural labor that recuperates the detritus of city life; social reproductive labor that undergirds these systems and life itself; and hands-on repair work inherent to care. By understanding maintenance and repair work as care, our paper demonstrates the importance of this labor to our collective survival in a broken world, and the imperative of embracing a care ethics where we shoulder together the everyday burdens and benefits to live “as well as possible”.
Well-versed in the production of waste, corporate capital has not generally focused on capitalisi... more Well-versed in the production of waste, corporate capital has not generally focused on capitalising on waste. The discards of consumption, previously approached broadly as mere waste, have recently found rebirth in an increasingly corporate waste market in India. Ranging from contracts for waste collection and incineration-plant installation to sales of recyclables, formal businesses are entering the business of revaluing waste, often to the detriment of India’s already existing informal waste sector that has long conducted its own waste-based businesses. This new, increasingly corporate, business of waste is intimately connected to a new waste governance regime in India. Concerns regarding two symbolically significant waste streams, municipal solid waste and electronic waste, illuminate waste beyond its “management,” and demonstrate its embeddedness in matters of consumerism, informal-sector livelihoods, and urban ecology.
University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. August 2018. Major: Geography. Advisor: Vinay Gidwani... more University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. August 2018. Major: Geography. Advisor: Vinay Gidwani. 1 computer file (PDF); xii, 279 pages.
If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for pr... more If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for profits is the abstraction of life itself and of the human/nonhuman relations that sustain it, creating a wake of waste in its path. Repairing the fraying human and ecological systems that underwrite life entails ongoing care work that is frequently invisible or devalued, and whose burdens fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations. We detail this through three connected instances: infrastructural labor that recuperates the detritus of city life; social reproductive labor that undergirds these systems and life itself; and hands-on repair work inherent to care. By understanding maintenance and repair work as care, our paper demonstrates the importance of this labor to our collective survival in a broken world, and the imperative of embracing a care ethics where we shoulder together the everyday burdens and benefits to live “as well as possible”.
Environmental discourses on electronic waste have converged around two framings of e-waste as a s... more Environmental discourses on electronic waste have converged around two framings of e-waste as a significant global concern: as a polluting and hazardous waste product, and as an under-tapped source of value: an “urban mine.” This paper argues that the discursive shift between these two framings is not based in material differences between either the electronics themselves or related labor processes; instead, the major determining factor in e-waste’s categorization as hazard or resource is based on the category of labor working on it and where it is located. Drawing on research in India’s used electronics industry, this paper argues that when associated with informal labor in the Global South, e-waste is easily devalued and judged a hazardous waste through devaluing the labor that works on it. The conflation of pollution with informal labor in the Global South offers such a powerful narrative, particularly in governance and industry circles, that it has become a significant way to devalue e-waste in the Global South, opening up “new” frontiers of value that would otherwise be captured by local, predominantly informal, industry. Thus, environmental concerns about the hazards of e-waste can be used to secure corporate e-waste markets through devaluing informal labor.
This paper follows the return of electronic waste back into commodity circuits through widespread... more This paper follows the return of electronic waste back into commodity circuits through widespread processes of reuse, repair and remanufacturing across Delhi, India. Tracing the movements of ‘‘waste’’ from the scrap shop back into secondary use industries, I situate e-waste in India as operating primarily within economies of reuse and repair, rather than waste and recycling. Instead of managing waste, India’s broad reuse industries are production-based, maintaining and making new things out of a diversity of new and used materials. The production of value from used things is dependent on the e-waste trader and the repair worker, who see the potential for seemingly unlimited trajectories of multitudinous conditions and configurations. This view of e-waste from the repair shop (and even the scrap shop) rather than a recycling factory offers a very different rendering of e-waste and particularly informal e-waste labor in the Global South than is presented in policy and popular media. Building on scholarship on vibrant waste economies, I demonstrate that India’s electronic ‘‘waste’’ sector is in fact a powerful source of value (and product) creation and call into question e-waste as a definitive ‘‘waste’’ product and its management in a ‘‘waste’’ economy.
In response to Carr's article, ‘Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis’, I expl... more In response to Carr's article, ‘Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis’, I explore how repair labour demonstrates the importance of skilled, hands-on labour for responding to times of breakdown and change. Like scholarship on apprenticeship and practical enskilment, repair work demonstrates how labour entails working with the material world and other workers, and hands-on engagement with complex and changing systems. Instead of approaching labour and environmental concerns as separate and often antagonistic, I believe attending to the embodied and relational nature of labour may provide insight on how to work towards a more just socio-environmental future.
In response to Carr's article, 'Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis', I explore ... more In response to Carr's article, 'Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis', I explore how repair labour demonstrates the importance of skilled, hands-on labour for responding to times of breakdown and change. Like scholarship on apprenticeship and practical enskilment, repair work demonstrates how labour entails working with the material world and other workers, and hands-on engagement with complex and changing systems. Instead of approaching labour and environmental concerns as separate and often antagonistic, I believe attending to the embodied and relational nature of labour may provide insight on how to work towards a more just socio-environmental future.
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2017
This paper follows the return of electronic waste back into commodity circuits through widespread... more This paper follows the return of electronic waste back into commodity circuits through widespread processes of reuse, repair and remanufacturing across Delhi, India. Tracing the movements of “waste” from the scrap shop back into secondary use industries, I situate e-waste in India as operating primarily within economies of reuse and repair, rather than waste and recycling. Instead of managing waste, India’s broad reuse industries are production-based, maintaining and making new things out of a diversity of new and used materials. The production of value from used things is dependent on the e-waste trader and the repair worker, who see the potential for seemingly unlimited trajectories of multitudinous conditions and configurations. This view of e-waste from the repair shop (and even the scrap shop) rather than a recycling factory offers a very different rendering of e-waste and particularly informal e-waste labor in the Global South than is presented in policy and popular media. Bui...
If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for pr... more If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for profits is the abstraction of life itself and of the human/nonhuman relations that sustain it, creating a wake of waste in its path. Repairing the fraying human and ecological systems that underwrite life entails ongoing care work that is frequently invisible or devalued, and whose burdens fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations. We detail this through three connected instances: infrastructural labor that recuperates the detritus of city life; social reproductive labor that undergirds these systems and life itself; and hands-on repair work inherent to care. By understanding maintenance and repair work as care, our paper demonstrates the importance of this labor to our collective survival in a broken world, and the imperative of embracing a care ethics where we shoulder together the everyday burdens and benefits to live “as well as possible”.
Well-versed in the production of waste, corporate capital has not generally focused on capitalisi... more Well-versed in the production of waste, corporate capital has not generally focused on capitalising on waste. The discards of consumption, previously approached broadly as mere waste, have recently found rebirth in an increasingly corporate waste market in India. Ranging from contracts for waste collection and incineration-plant installation to sales of recyclables, formal businesses are entering the business of revaluing waste, often to the detriment of India’s already existing informal waste sector that has long conducted its own waste-based businesses. This new, increasingly corporate, business of waste is intimately connected to a new waste governance regime in India. Concerns regarding two symbolically significant waste streams, municipal solid waste and electronic waste, illuminate waste beyond its “management,” and demonstrate its embeddedness in matters of consumerism, informal-sector livelihoods, and urban ecology.
University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. August 2018. Major: Geography. Advisor: Vinay Gidwani... more University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. August 2018. Major: Geography. Advisor: Vinay Gidwani. 1 computer file (PDF); xii, 279 pages.
If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for pr... more If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for profits is the abstraction of life itself and of the human/nonhuman relations that sustain it, creating a wake of waste in its path. Repairing the fraying human and ecological systems that underwrite life entails ongoing care work that is frequently invisible or devalued, and whose burdens fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations. We detail this through three connected instances: infrastructural labor that recuperates the detritus of city life; social reproductive labor that undergirds these systems and life itself; and hands-on repair work inherent to care. By understanding maintenance and repair work as care, our paper demonstrates the importance of this labor to our collective survival in a broken world, and the imperative of embracing a care ethics where we shoulder together the everyday burdens and benefits to live “as well as possible”.
Environmental discourses on electronic waste have converged around two framings of e-waste as a s... more Environmental discourses on electronic waste have converged around two framings of e-waste as a significant global concern: as a polluting and hazardous waste product, and as an under-tapped source of value: an “urban mine.” This paper argues that the discursive shift between these two framings is not based in material differences between either the electronics themselves or related labor processes; instead, the major determining factor in e-waste’s categorization as hazard or resource is based on the category of labor working on it and where it is located. Drawing on research in India’s used electronics industry, this paper argues that when associated with informal labor in the Global South, e-waste is easily devalued and judged a hazardous waste through devaluing the labor that works on it. The conflation of pollution with informal labor in the Global South offers such a powerful narrative, particularly in governance and industry circles, that it has become a significant way to devalue e-waste in the Global South, opening up “new” frontiers of value that would otherwise be captured by local, predominantly informal, industry. Thus, environmental concerns about the hazards of e-waste can be used to secure corporate e-waste markets through devaluing informal labor.
This paper follows the return of electronic waste back into commodity circuits through widespread... more This paper follows the return of electronic waste back into commodity circuits through widespread processes of reuse, repair and remanufacturing across Delhi, India. Tracing the movements of ‘‘waste’’ from the scrap shop back into secondary use industries, I situate e-waste in India as operating primarily within economies of reuse and repair, rather than waste and recycling. Instead of managing waste, India’s broad reuse industries are production-based, maintaining and making new things out of a diversity of new and used materials. The production of value from used things is dependent on the e-waste trader and the repair worker, who see the potential for seemingly unlimited trajectories of multitudinous conditions and configurations. This view of e-waste from the repair shop (and even the scrap shop) rather than a recycling factory offers a very different rendering of e-waste and particularly informal e-waste labor in the Global South than is presented in policy and popular media. Building on scholarship on vibrant waste economies, I demonstrate that India’s electronic ‘‘waste’’ sector is in fact a powerful source of value (and product) creation and call into question e-waste as a definitive ‘‘waste’’ product and its management in a ‘‘waste’’ economy.
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