Discard Studies, one of my favorite garbage resources, shared this link today to a screening next week of the documentary Trash Dance. I just RSVPed. Here’s the trailer, via the film’s official website.
A choreographer finds beauty and grace in garbage trucks, and against the odds, rallies reluctant city trash collectors to perform an extraordinary dance spectacle. On an abandoned airport runway, two dozen sanitation workers—and their trucks—inspire an audience of thousands.
Trash wonks, prepare for your dirty little hearts to explode. Discard Studies, the online hub for scholarly waste, just posted a meta reading list that should keep you occupied all summer and many seasons to come. It’s a compilation of syllabi from your favorite trashademics.
I can’t wait to dig through the course reading assignments from garbology classes taught at NYU, Evergreen, Johns Hopkins, UC Berkeley and other institutions for classes with amazing titles including: “The Joy of Garbage,” “Fetishist, Collector, Hoarder,” and “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics: Sex, Drugs, and Garbage.”
What a resource!
On Wednesday, December 8th, Dr. Robin Nagle, New York’s Department of Sanitation anthropologist in residence, is giving a talk entitled “The Twist-Ties that Bind” as part of an ongoing series of Freshkills Park talks. Here’s the description:
Join Dr. Robin Nagle to learn (almost) everything you ever wanted to know about garbage in New York. Discover how profoundly it connects us to each other, to history, to politics, to infrastructure and technology. Hear stories and reflections from people who shoulder its burdens. Glimpse some of its surprising secrets. Consider why we need to ignore it, and ponder the consequences of its invisibility. The insights you glean migh…t just change forever the way you see your city.
Dr. Nagle is the anthropologist-in-residence for the Department of Sanitation. She is also director of the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University, where she teaches anthropology and urban studies. Her book Picking Up, about what it is to be a sanitation worker in New York and why you should care, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the New York City Department of Sanitation and the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University.
I highly recommend checking out this event if you’re in or near NYC. Freshkills Park has created a Facebook event so you don’t forget. And even if you can’t make it, check out Dr. Nagle’s garblog, Discard Studies. As we’ve mentioned before, it’s rad.
Robin Nagle, anthropologist in residence for the Department of Sanitation, New York City, is both a favorite tipster and topic here at everydaytrash.com. Today’s Nagle-find is the very exciting news that the professor herself has entered the world of garblogging! Her nascent site, Discard Studies, aspires to become a nexus of trash scholarship, a clearinghouse of academics exploring questions of waste and a living bibliography of their work. We are VERY EXCITED to see this initiative take off. The success of the project depends on spreading the word. If you know of related work underway, in some shade of gray or already published, please pass it along. Garbologists unite!
And in the meantime, check out the blog’s first few posts. Every single one is fascinating.
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