Amidst Garbage and Poison: An Essay on Polluted Peoples and Places

Auyero, Javier; Swistun, Débora

doi:10.1525/ctx.2007.6.2.46

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…However, for scavengers, discarded wastes are neither simple utilities nor necessarily polluting, but complex and potentially enriching materials. To say that scavenging waste is about possibility rather than necessity, about what people make of waste rather than what they must do with it, is not to deny the very real constraints and indignities often associated with the practice (see especially Auyero and Swistun, 2007). Rather, it is to recognize the agency and creativity of scavengers.…”

Section: Scavenging: Necessity and Possibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure

Reno

2009

Journal of Material Culture

100

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This paper discusses scavenging and dumping as alternative approaches to deriving value from rubbish at a large Michigan landfill. Both practices are attuned to the indeterminacy and power of abandoned things, but in different ways. Whereas scavenging relies on acquiring familiarity with an object by getting to know its particular qualities, landfilling and other forms of mass disposal make discards fungible and manipulable by stripping them of their former identities. By way of examining the different ways in which people become invested in the politics of value at the landfill, whether as part of expressions of gender and class or for personal enjoyment, different comportments toward materiality are revealed to have underlying social and moral implications. In particular, it is argued that different approaches to the evaluation of rubbish involve competing understandings of human and material potential.

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Section: Scavenging: Necessity and Possibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure

Reno

2009

Journal of Material Culture

100

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“…Modeled on the projects of Auyero and Swistun (2007), Dennis et al (2009), Loebach and Gilliland (2010), and Teixeira (2015), students in our PPM project worked directly with young people living in low-income environments to take photos of significant aspects of their community. Young people can provide perspective and insight into their communities that an outside researcher cannot, and PPM also engages them in the research process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Context of Authority and Sociological Knowledge: An Experiential Learning Project

Waity¹,

Crowe²

2019

comminfolit

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In this innovative project, a social sciences librarian partnered with a sociology professor to embed the "Authority is Constructed and Contextual" frame into an upper-division sociology of poverty course. Students in this course participated in an experiential learning project, collaborating with local children on a participatory photo mapping project to document the children's neighborhood. By working directly with community members in this field experience, the students gained an understanding of the differences between scholarly authority and community authority and what can be learned about poverty from each type of source. Engagement with a local community provides students with a direct understanding of the contextual nature of cognitive authority and can be replicated in a variety of settings.

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Drawing out culture: productive methods to measure cognition and resonance

McDonnell

2014

Theor Soc

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Amidst Garbage and Poison: An Essay on Polluted Peoples and Places

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure

Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure

The Context of Authority and Sociological Knowledge: An Experiential Learning Project

Drawing out culture: productive methods to measure cognition and resonance

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