Special issue of Laboratorium. Review of Social Research, a peer-review journal
of empirical social research published in hard copy and online
Language: English or Russian
Contacts: Oksana Parfenova (oksana.parfenova@gmail.com) or Marc Elie (marc.elie@cercec.cnrs.fr)
Deadline: 1st December 2011
CfP for Laboratorium, Review of Social Research, a peer-review journal
of empirical social research published in hard copy and online
Abstracts accepted until December 1st 2011
Sociologists have drawn attention to the paradox that trash, the least
valuable substance in the value hierarchy of modern societies, is
nonetheless crucial to explaining how society works. Refuse diffuses
among societal layers, and how we handle trash reveals important
aspects of the social order.
It is often assumed that modern societies created trash as the last
element of the consumption chain, breaking the traditional circularity
of agricultural production. What society rejects is nonetheless or
precisely because of this replete with symbols, values, and
ideologies. Practices of trash disposing, sorting, collecting, and
reusing give insight into belief systems, social hierarchies, class
and gender behavior, and many other social phenomena. What are the
social practices of trash gathering, classifying, reusing, and
recycling throughout history and today? What do they tell us about
interactions between people, of the patterns of consumption and of the
conception of otherness?
In recent years, with the growing pace of industrialization and
urbanization around the world, the controversial and problematic
aspects of trash have come to the forefront of global politics and
science. As trash is no longer considered an unavoidable consequence
of progress, the management and recycling of industrial and domestic
waste has become not only a pressing technological and logistic issue
for municipalities and states, but a poignant bone of contention
between social and economic actors.
Waste management – where to locate landfills or build waste
incineration and recycling facilities – is more often than not an
issue of environmental justice. How do citizens and public authorities
tackle the trash issue? How is it framed in public discourse by civic
associations, parties, scientists, and officials?
With the change of scale of environmental damages, trash and
industrial hazardous materials now travel across natural and
administrative borders. A recent development is the international
trash trade: trash is treated as a commodity and shipped from richer
to poorer countries (from Western Europe to West Africa, for
instance). But this is not always the case, as the recycling of
nuclear waste in Russia and France shows. What are the economics and
politics of the globalized waste trade?
Laboratorium’s special issue on waste and trash welcomes papers in
sociology, history, political sciences, anthropology, social geography
and other disciplines that can provide insight into social practices
around waste. Work based on transnational or comparative approaches is
especially welcome.
Send abstracts (of no more than 500 words) in one of Laboratorium’s
working languages (English or Russian) to Oksana Parfenova
(oksana.parfenova@gmail.com) and Marc Elie (marc.elie@cercec.cnrs.fr)
by December 1st 2011.
Authors of abstracts selected for publication will be notified by
January 15th 2012 and will be expected to submit full-length articles
(in one of two languages) no later than June 1st 2012. Laboratorium
will publish the papers that succeeded in the peer-review process in
one of its issues for 2013.