2019 IUAES Intercongress World Solidarities
https://www.iuaes2019.org
From Waste to Resource. Anthropology of Recycling of Urban Scums [Commission on Urban Anthropology]
We will focus on the way urban anthropology is addressing the issue of recycling waste into resource in the formal and informal contexts of both production and appropriation of the living space, reevaluating the categories of thought and values of clean and dirty, useful and useless.
As Douglas has showed it, dirt is a matter out of place and beyond classifications, what and whom we consider as unclean challenges the social order and it is classified as a scum by society. Kristeva also argues that our seemingly natural reaction to abject and abjection needs to be (re)considered and interpreted in spatial metaphors. “Spaces of abjection” therefore produce beliefs and practices related to the distanciation and distinction of the unclean while stigmatize and marginalize not only individuals and populations but also the way those are materially and spatially inscribed. Recycling and all the activities related to the process of reclassification of the unnecessary and/or unclean in fact re-evaluates the categories of thought, values and social hierarchies of clean and dirty, useful and useless, dignified and undignified, noble and ignoble.
We are particularly interested in the processes through which waste becomes a resource both in formal and informal contexts of habitat. This invites us to study the conception, perception and experience of spaces (Lefevbre) by questioning 1) The use of waste in space conception and production. 2) The ways people inhabit spaces, the uses and appropriations of waste by residents, domestic units and collective spaces. Capitalism's way of recovering from these forms of critiques of industrial production and overconsumption (Boltanski and Chiapello) by transforming it into symbolic and market value (as recycling lobbying), will also attract our attention.
Deadline for the submission of paper: 15 February 2019.
https://www.iuaes2019.org/paper-guidelines/
How to submit : https://www.iuaes2019.org/paper-guidelines/