Waste as Posthuman Critique

Abstract

Engaging with waste scholarship, STS, and posthumanist feminist literature while also employing snippets from our ongoing garbographic fieldwork, the chapter explores the dis/entanglement of humans and waste by placing a spotlight on minoritarian encounters and messy relations. The underlying rationale of this exploration is to problematize and disrupt the ontological hygiene characterizing the intricate relationship of our societies with waste. The chapter examines how humans are entangled with waste much more intimately than current modes and technologies of waste management and the technocratic zero-waste utopia of the idealized circular economy would make us believe. Ultimately, rather than adhering to conventional notions that consider waste as a passive end-product of human classifications, we approach it as a vital, unruly matter that necessitates immediate efforts to discover ways to live with it. This urge also prompts the need to critically confront the anthropocentric notion of care.