Human-produced waste is a major environmental concern, with communities considering various waste management practices, such as increased recycling, landfilling, incineration, and waste-to-energy technologies. This article is concerned with how and why publics assemble around waste management issues. In particular, we explore Noortje Marres and Bruno Latour’s theory that publics do not exist prior to issues but rather assemble around objects, and through these assemblages, objects become matters of concern that sometimes become political. The article addresses this theory of making things public through a study of a small city in Ontario, Canada, whose landfill is closed and waste diversion options are saturated, and that faces unsustainable costs in shipping its waste to the United States, China, and other regions. The city’s officials are undertaking a cost–benefit assessment to determine the efficacy of siting a new landfill or other waste management facility. We are interested in emphasizing the complexity of making (or not making) landfills public, by exploring an object in action, where members of the public may or may not assemble, waste may or may not be made into an issue, and waste is sufficiently routinized that it is not typically transformed from an object to an issue. We hope to demonstrate Latour’s third and fifth senses of politics best account for waste management’s trajectory as a persistent yet inconsistent matter of public concern.

The knowledge content of university-level introductory sustainability courses elicits emotional reactions by students that are novel within the typical classroom context. Common negative reactions include ‘sadness’, ‘worry’, ‘guilt’ and ‘disgust’, while more positive responses include ‘feeling angry’, ‘empowered’, ‘like trying to make a difference’ or ‘having raised awareness’. These emotions are indexical of a deeper social epistemic collision between historically established social identities, including behavioural scripts consistent with, and generative of, unsustainability on the one hand, and a growing collective awareness of the consequent unsustainability that threatens students’ future well-being on the other. The authors argue that introductory sustainability courses set up the potential for not only a learned eco-anxiety, but also an ontological adjustment. That adjustment might bring student, historical inheritance and environment from a state of living in a suffering, but still separate, world to a practice of becoming with a world into which we extend and that also extends into us. Therefore, it is arguably important for instructors to be aware of the possibility of students getting into a negative state of eco-anxiety and for instructors to also have some tools for supporting a more positive ontological adjustment. We recommend that they become skilled in facilitating transformational learning by including some discussions about the ontology of self in any introductory sustainability instruction. Directing students’ attention to their own emotional responses can also be useful for grounding such classroom discussions and transformational learning.

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In Fat Activism, Cooper responds to mainstream and scholarly writings on fat activism that she claims create negative assumptions or "proxies" of fat people. These constructed proxies serve to efface, reduce, and oversimplify the voices and the lived experiences of fat activists and fat activism. Through proxies, fat people are further marginalized and estranged from writings about what it means to be fat and what it means to be an activist. In this context, fat is a descriptive word that rejects medicalized terminology and encompasses non-normative embodiments of adipose tissue. Fat is not a bad word: it is powerful, political, and not without controversy.One of Cooper's major frustrations is that jargon-filled academic research only expresses a limited, monolithic scope of fat activism; therefore, she goes to great lengths to make sure that fat people are not othered or tokenized in her text. Cooper employs inclusive language-fat people are referred to as "us", not "them". We are fat, we are present, and we are not complicit in totalitarian obesity discourses that define fat as an issue that requires solutions or interventions. Through this first-person language, Cooper creates an arena for a more dynamic, comprehensive discourse that makes space for all types of experiences and voices in fat activist communities.Cooper's six-part book describes the origins of fat activism proxies-like body positivity, fat acceptance, eating disorders, and health-and starts to "undo" and complicate these falsehoods. Here Cooper critiques some of the staples of fat activist literature-including Marilyn Wann's oft-cited Fat!So?-as contributing to overly reductive accounts of fat activism that are not representative of the expansive, messy social phenomenon as a whole. The second part of the book broadly explores what fat activism is and how to "do" it. Cooper outlines that fat activism is done through: political process activism and collective influence; community building; cultural work through the act of "making things" (p. 68); micro activism/identity