The Posthumanities Hub

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Tag: Waste

Environmental Racism is Garbage! Symposium – Call for Submissions, deadline 30 Nov, 2020

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On October 20, 2020

In Call for Papers, Conferences, Symposiums, The Seed Box, Webinars

Submission Deadline:  30 November 2020  
Symposium: 27-29 May 2021  

The aim of this interactive virtual research-creation and art symposium is to bear modest witness to waste as a symptom of environmental racism. At least one billion people live in over a quarter of a million slums worldwide, often with no formal waste or sanitation infrastructure or services (Davis 2007). And in economically affluent countries, landfills and other waste management systems are most often sited in or close to poor and racialized communities (for example, Amegah and Jaakkola 2016; Furedy 1993; Mothiba, Moja, and Loans 2017; Parizeau 2006) who bear a disproportionate burden of persistent exposure to the risks, hazards and contamination of pollution (Hird in press; Hird and Zahara 2016). 

Environmental Racism is Garbage seeks knowledge production and acts of resistance at the intersection of art, politics, and the relationship between racialized injustice and ecological crisis. We invite contributions and collaborations from visual and performance-based artists, curators, theorists and activists, to create submissions that engage with the interconnections between environmental health, socio-economic conditions, racialized discrimination, social justice. We are interested in new or recent work in any medium that could be displayed in a browser. Transdisciplinary work driven by creative inquiry and lived experience will be forefronted.

This virtual (web-based) symposium will be synchronous and asynchronous and feature artwork displayed in the browser as well as keynote speakers, discussion panels and other additions. The symposium will be archived on a dedicated website.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

  1. Project description and [technical] requirements for displaying (online), including artist/author statement (2 pages maximum).
  2. Supporting documentation: i.e. maximum 5 images, 1 (3 min or under) video clip or sound recording sample.
  3. Current CV (3 pages maximum) for all team members
  4. Artist/author/activist/curator/theorist biography for all team members (maximum 100 words each)

Please submit your work through this form by November 30, 2020. Submissions will be reviewed by a transdisciplinary panel including members of The Seedbox Consortium, Canada’s Waste Flow, and Queen’s University. 

Priority will be given to applicants who are Indigenous, Black, people of colour, women, LGBTQ2+, people with disabilities, and/or are members of other equity-seeking groups.

Each project selected will receive a payment of $1000 CAD and another $500 CAD per additional artist, for a total of up to $2000 CAD per submission. Project Fees will be paid after completion of the symposium. Details of the post-symposium publication to follow.
The full call for submission can be found here
Please submit projects here by November 30th, 2020  

We invite you to share this call with colleagues who might be interested, and direct any questions to: help@environmentalracismisgarbage.art

The Posthumanities Hub Seminar with Myra Hird (Queen’s University, Canada) on 18th October, 10:15-12:00

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On October 7, 2019

In Events

Welcome to The Posthumanities Hub Seminar with Myra Hird on Iqaluit’s Dumpcano and the Indeterminate Material Politics of Waste.

When: 18th October, 10:15-12
Where: in the seminar room at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH (Teknikringen 74 D, Stockholm).

Facebook event

Abstract:
Iqaluit, Nunavut Canada’s capital city, became a center of controversy when its main ‘West 40’ dump spontaneously caught fire on May 20th 2014. This presentation argues that Iqaluit’s ‘dumpcano’ may be usefully understood as a virtuality that temporarily condensed a set of relations between the dump as a material object (or more specifically a multi-species bio-geology) and a number of economic, cultural, political, and social conditions. Drawing upon archival sources and primary interview data with a range of local respondents, my presentation examines how scientific and government discourses attempted to convey to the public a uniform ‘message’ of scientific certainty concerning levels of contamination and threats to human health and the environment. For their part, concerned residents and emergent activist groups engaged with official and unofficial ‘messaging’ in terms of material uncertainty. As such, the discourses that developed around the dump fire differentially made visible and registered, or obscured and attempted to displace, the shifting material properties of the dump. I make the case that non-expert local residents were able to effectively mobilize scientific uncertainty to draw attention to the links between the dump fire and issues of social justice.

Bio:
Myra J. Hird is Professor, Queen’s National Scholar, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in the School of Environmental Studies, Queen’s University, Canada (www.myrahird.com). Professor Hird is Director of Waste Flow, an interdisciplinary research project focused on waste as a global scientific-technical and socio-ethical issue (www.wasteflow.ca).  Hird has published nine books and over seventy articles and book chapters on a diversity of topics relating to science studies. Hird’s forthcoming book is entitled Canada’s Waste Flows and will be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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