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Junior Research Fellow Dr Michael Picard is researching this theme.
This theme is open to the widest possible interpretation and is assumed to address the concerns of many disciplines and departments while providing a frame for thinking across or even bypassing entrenched or established modes of thinking. It could include the following concerns:
- Waste and space, waste of space – wastelands, waste dumps, no-go areas and washed out zones, land laid waste, disused space, space abandoned or unloved, uninhabited and uncultivated, overgrown or desolate, watery waste, space laid waste by damage/design, environmental/ecologies of waste/space, spatializing waste, land-fill and land left, leakages and spillages, poisoned landscapes and toxic fall out, weeds and wild growth, international politics of waste, transporting waste, geographies of consumption and rubbish
- Waste and cities – lifecycles of buildings and sites, atmospheric waste and pollution, waste management planning, waste and density, energy waste, waste and urban/building design, urban wastelands, demolition/destruction waste (e.g. through fire) and urban contamination/regeneration, waste and regeneration
- Waste and time – time wasting, spare time, squandering effort and energy, using up time, spoiling or spilling time, life-wasting, wasting away, degeneration and decay, the ravages of time, the uses of time
- Waste and money – useless expenditure, rampant consumption, squandering and seduction, throwing away, used up stuff, writing off, built in expendability, economies of waste, consumer culture, excess, extraneous commodities and surplus stuff
- Wasting of/from the body – decay, disease, wasting away, waste matter, secretions and emissions, bodily waste (blood, sweat, skin, excrement, snot, pus, urine) shedding and peeling, oozing and emitting, pouring and secreting, unsuccessful organ transplantation and tissue regeneration, recycling bodies – burying, incinerating and composting
- Waste and things – rubbish and rot, throwing out, throwing away, wear and tear, decay, left-overs, refuse, uselessness, by-products and binned goods, putrefaction, literal waste – garbage, excrement, detritus and trash, refuse matter; unserviceable material, remainders, useless by-products, unsaleable stuff, dangerous waste – pollution, carcinogenic and radioactive matter, poisoning – and its psychic and physic consequence
- Useful waste – repurposing, recycling, re-using, transformation, treatment and technology, repair and reuse, channelling waste – infrastructures of waste – sewage, excremental economies, lavs and loos, the architecture of waste – toilets, recycling plants, building materials and structures from left-overs and salvage, sustainability and harnessing energy and stuff, composting and composing from waste and muck, fermenting and rotting, circular economy and zero waste
- People and waste – societal dregs, those designated as rubbish or worthless, useless folks and expendable groups, the dirty and undesirable, the surplus and vilified, class and caste, labour and livelihoods, waste workers and garbage collectors, waste harvesters and contaminated/infected communities/folks, figurations of filth: rag pickers, street urchins, marginalised groups; unproductive labour, citizens and subjects
- Waste and behaviour – brain function and waste, habits of wastefulness, changing behaviour, managing waste, psychic excess, emotions and energies, dirt and desire, scatology, waste and education – consumption behaviour, mass media, information and propaganda, political correctness
- Waste and technology – obsolescence, malfunctioning, disused matter and materials, digital waste and trash – and its consumption of physical space, surplus and virtual expenditure and excess
Image: Vivan Sundaram, Prospect, 2008, Archival Pigment Print, 104.5 x 59.5 inches, ed 5/10
Upcoming events
Sound archive
Past Events
IAS/Urban Lab Waste: Financing Prosperity by Dealing with Debts
9:30am to 5pm, 12 September 2019
IAS/Urban Lab Waste: Urban Imaginaries of Waste, Excess, and Abandonment
The IAS and the Urban Lab are delighted to welcome Prof. Christoph Lindner, Dean of The Bartlett, for the launch of the IAS/Urban Lab Waste Public Lecture Series. Respondent: José Torero Cullen (Department of Civil, Environmental, Geomatic & Environmental Engineering). Chaired by Clare Melhuish (Urban Lab) and introduced by Tamar Garb (IAS/History of Art)
6pm to 8pm, 2 October 2019
IAS/Urban Lab Waste: Inside-Out Earth - Residues of the Anthropocene in Africa
The IAS is delighted to welcome Prof. Gabrielle Hecht, Stanford University, for this talk. Andrew Barry (Geography, UCL) and Simukai Chigudu (International Development, Oxford) will provide responses.
5:15pm to 7:15pm, 23 October 2019
IAS/Urban Lab Waste: Hide & Seek: the bug and the city
HIDE & SEEK is an open science-drama experiment for staff, researchers and students during UCL Reading Week/ National Pathology Week, 4 – 8 November 2019.
10am, 4 November 2019 to 5pm, 8 November 2019
IAS/Urban Lab Waste: Waste Words - recycling research into performance
This session is an introductory playwriting session for anyone interested in recycling their current, or discarded, research into shiny new performance. We’ll do some basic playwriting exercises to identify and develop themes, conflicts, images
12:45pm to 2:15pm, 14 November 2019
IAS Screening: Les glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000)
by Agnès Varda
6pm to 7:30pm, 9 December 2019
IAS/Urban Lab Waste: De la Flâneuse à la Glaneuse - Engagements with others’ waste
We are delighted to welcome Lucy Bell (Literature and Languages, Surrey), Tim Cresswell (Geography, Edinburgh), Carina Millstone (Feedback Foundation), Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths) and Rose Marie San Juan (History of Art, UCL) for this panel discussion.
4pm to 7pm, 10 December 2019
IAS Book Launch: Maxwell Street - Writing and Thinking Place
We are delighted to welcome Tim Cresswell (University of Edinburgh) for the launch of his book 'Maxwell Street - Writing and Thinking Place'. Hayley Newman and Sharon Morris (Slade, UCL), Tariq Jazeel (Geography, UCL) and Sabina Andron (Bartlett, UCL
6pm To 8pm, 11 December 2019
IAS/Urban Lab Waste:"Goodbye Green Growth"? Why the problem of growth misidentifies our predicament
Timothy Mitchell (Columbia). Chaired by Andrew Barry (Geography, UCL)
4:30pm to 6pm, 16 January 2020
IAS/Urban Lab Waste: Biopolitics of the Plasticene
Panel discussion exploring artistic interventions in a plasticised world, with presentations by art historian Amanda Boetzkes (University of Guelph, Canada), author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019) and Polish artist Diana Lelonek, creator of the Centre for Living Things (2016-), a response by Wood Roberdeau (Critical Ecologies, Goldsmiths), moderated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (IAS UCL).
6pm to 8pm, 24 January 2020