The “Cultures of Waste” International conference will take place on August 7-9th, 2026, at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India. Confirmed keynote speakers are Myra J. Hird, Professor in the School of Environmental Studies at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada, and Cecilia Åsberg, Professor of Gender, Nature, and Culture at Linköping University, Sweden.
Conference concept
When Myra Hird develops a ‘public sociology of waste’ in her book of the same title, she talks in terms of ‘framing’ waste. This Conference addresses modes of framing waste and the cultures in which waste is framed: as a problem, as a resource, and so on. It examines imaginaries of wasted bodies, landscapes, processes that construct waste as monstrosities, redundancies, excesses. Focusing on literary texts from the high literary to the popular, the speculative and the ‘new weird’, the Conference seeks papers on waste/d bodies, the nonhuman as/in waste, hybrids-as-waste, the waste Anthropocene among others.
Scholars and writers with various intellectual engagements including contemporary Gothic studies (like Catherine Spooner and Fred Botting), critical body studies (like Susan Bordo, Esther Rothblum, and Marilyn Wann), energy humanities (like Imre Szeman and Tanner Mirrlees), posthumanism (like Rosi Baridotti, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad), and last but not least gender and queer studies (like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Sara Ahmed) have recursively addressed how waste and excess define the tech-driven consumerist world we inhabit. How do cultures of waste and excess define the current human condition? How do we imagine environmental crises and energy shortages within intellectual debates of waste? What genres in, say, the literary, enable a critical literacy of/around waste? How are human and non-human identities impacted by excesses and redundancy resulting from a highly commercialized, technologized, and transnational culture which characterizes the present times? How do we approach wasted and wasting bodies, or wasted – and therefore disposable – peoples of modernity?
“Cultures of Waste” will be an attempt to delve into some of these critical questions and more.
The conference seeks to address matters of waste and excess through topics such as:
- Environmental degradation and waste
- Embodiment, decay, and waste
- Gendered identity as waste and excess
- Gothic narratives and the concept of waste
- Body image, body shaming, and excess
- Energy crisis and cultures of waste
- Posthumanism, waste, and excess
- Climate crisis and waste
- Anthropocene, ecological crises, and waste
The conference is organised by the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies, Department of English, The University of Hyderabad.
More information to come!