Download or read book Rubbish Theory written by Michael Thompson and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do objects that are worth little to nothing become valuable? Who is behind the creation of value, and which types of people find value and comfort in transient, durable, and rubbish objects? When his highly influential Rubbish Theory, first published in 1979, Michael Thompson launched the discipline of waste studies. It remains the most comprehensive analysis on the culture of waste to date. Thompson argues that there are two mutually exclusive cultural categories that are socially imposed on the world of objects: a transient category and a durable category. However, he identifies a region of flexibility, wherein a transient object that declines in value and life span can linger in a valueless and timeless limbo of rubbish, until it is discovered by a creative individual and transferred into something deemed durable. He links stability and change on one hand, with materiality on the other, providing a rich analysis of social and cultural dynamics. His instrumental theory of rubbish draws on case studies and anthropological fieldwork to highlight the ever-changing subtleties of object value and our complex relationship to waste. Bringing Rubbish Theory back into print, this updated edition includes a new introduction, preface, foreword, and afterword, thoroughly exploring how Thompson's key theories have affected our world in the four decades since it was first published and placing it in a contemporary context that shines light on the continued relevance of the book today

Download or read book Rubbish Theory written by Michael Thompson and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do objects that are worth little to nothing become valuable? Who is behind the creation of value, and which types of people find value and comfort in transient, durable, and rubbish objects? When his highly influential Rubbish Theory, first published in 1979, Michael Thompson launched the discipline of waste studies. It remains the most comprehensive analysis on the culture of waste to date. Thompson argues that there are two mutually exclusive cultural categories that are socially imposed on the world of objects: a transient category and a durable category. However, he identifies a region of flexibility, wherein a transient object that declines in value and life span can linger in a valueless and timeless limbo of rubbish, until it is discovered by a creative individual and transferred into something deemed durable. He links stability and change on one hand, with materiality on the other, providing a rich analysis of social and cultural dynamics. His instrumental theory of rubbish draws on case studies and anthropological fieldwork to highlight the ever-changing subtleties of object value and our complex relationship to waste. Bringing Rubbish Theory back into print, this updated edition includes a new introduction, preface, foreword, and afterword, thoroughly exploring how Thompson's key theories have affected our world in the four decades since it was first published and placing it in a contemporary context that shines light on the continued relevance of the book today.

Download or read book Digital Rubbish written by Jennifer Gabrys and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of the material life of information and its devices; of electronic waste in its physical and electronic incarnations; a cultural and material mapping of the spaces where electronics in the form of both hardware and information accumulate, break down, or are stowed away. Where other studies have addressed "digital" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Gabrys traces the material, spatial, cultural and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies. In the course of her book, she explores five interrelated "spaces" where electronics fall apart: from Silicon Valley to Nasdaq, from containers bound for China to museums and archives that preserve obsolete electronics as cultural artifacts, to the landfill as material repository. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics describes the materiality of electronics from a unique perspective, examining the multiple forms of waste that electronics create as evidence of the resources, labor, and imaginaries that are bundled into these machines. Ranging across studies of media and technology, as well as environments, geography, and design, Jennifer Gabrys draws together the far-reaching material and cultural processes that enable the making and breaking of these technologies.

Download or read book The Ethics of Waste written by Gay Hawkins and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gay Hawkins explores the ethical significance of waste in everyday life_from the broadest conceptions of waste and loss to how the environmental movement has affected the ways we think about garbage. Do we feel virtuous for reusing plastic bags and disdain those who don't? At what point does personal waste become public responsibility? How does this 'public conscience' affect policy? Placing these ideas into historical, social, and cultural perspective, this thoughtful book seeks ways to change ecologically destructive practices without recourse to guilt, moralism, or despair.

Download or read book Discard Studies written by Max Liboiron and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. Discard studies is an emerging field that looks at waste and wasting broadly construed. Rather than focusing on waste and trash as the primary objects of study, discard studies looks at wider systems of waste and wasting to explore how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued or devalued, becoming dominant or disposable. In this book, Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky argue that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. They show how the theories and methods of discard studies can be applied in a variety of cases, many of which do not involve waste, trash, or pollution. Liboiron and Lepawsky consider the partiality of knowledge and offer a theory of scale, exploring the myth that most waste is municipal solid waste produced by consumers; discuss peripheries, centers, and power, using content moderation as an example of how dominant systems find ways to discard; and use theories of difference to show that universalism, stereotypes, and inclusion all have politics of discard and even purification—as exemplified in “inclusive” efforts to broaden the Black Lives Matter movement. Finally, they develop a theory of change by considering “wasting well,” outlining techniques, methods, and propositions for a justice-oriented discard studies that keeps power in view.

Download or read book Garbage in Popular Culture written by Mehita Iqani and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Garbage in Popular Culture is the first book to explicitly link media discourse, consumer culture and the cultural politics of garbage in contemporary global society. It makes an original contribution to the areas of consumer culture studies, visual culture, media and communications, and cultural theory through a critical analysis of the ways in which waste and garbage are visually communicated in the public realm. Mehita Iqani examines three key themes evident in the global representation of garbage: questions of agency and activism, cultures of hedonism and luxury, and anxieties about devastation and its affect. Each theme is explored through a number of case studies, including zero-waste recycling campaigns communicated on Instagram, to fine art made with waste, popular entertainment festivals, tropical beach tourism, and films about oil spills and plastic waste in oceans. Iqani argues that we need a new vocabulary to think about what it means to be human in this new age of consumption-produced waste, and reflects on what rubbish allows us to learn about our relationship with the natural world.

Download or read book Bullshit Jobs written by David Graeber and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From David Graeber, the bestselling author of The Dawn of Everything and Debt—“a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate” (Slate)—a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs…and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are hordes of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. “Clever and charismatic” (The New Yorker), Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and “a thought-provoking examination of our working lives” (Financial Times).

Download or read book A Crisis of Waste written by Martin O'Brien and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a measured look at the 'crisis of waste' in modern society and it does so historically, sociologically and critically. It tells stories about past and present ‘crises’ of waste and puts them in their appropriate social and industrial contexts. From Charles Dickens to Don DeLillo, from the internal combustion engine to fish fingers, from kitchen grease to the Tour de France this book digs deep into society’s dust piles and emerges with untold treasures of the imagination.

Download or read book White Trash written by Nancy Isenberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestseller A New York Times Notable and Critics’ Top Book of 2016 Longlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction One of NPR's 10 Best Books Of 2016 Faced Tough Topics Head On NPR's Book Concierge Guide To 2016’s Great Reads San Francisco Chronicle's Best of 2016: 100 recommended books A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2016 Globe & Mail 100 Best of 2016 “Formidable and truth-dealing . . . necessary.” —The New York Times “This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.” —O Magazine In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg upends history as we know it by taking on our comforting myths about equality and uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash. “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.

Download or read book The Secret written by Rhonda Byrne and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tenth-anniversary edition of the book that changed lives in profound ways, now with a new foreword and afterword. In 2006, a groundbreaking feature-length film revealed the great mystery of the universe—The Secret—and, later that year, Rhonda Byrne followed with a book that became a worldwide bestseller. Fragments of a Great Secret have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies throughout the centuries. For the first time, all the pieces of The Secret come together in an incredible revelation that will be life-transforming for all who experience it. In this book, you’ll learn how to use The Secret in every aspect of your life—money, health, relationships, happiness, and in every interaction you have in the world. You’ll begin to understand the hidden, untapped power that’s within you, and this revelation can bring joy to every aspect of your life. The Secret contains wisdom from modern-day teachers—men and women who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness. By applying the knowledge of The Secret, they bring to light compelling stories of eradicating disease, acquiring massive wealth, overcoming obstacles, and achieving what many would regard as impossible.

Download or read book General Theory Of Employment Interest And Money written by John Maynard Keynes and published by Atlantic Publishers & Dist. This book was released on 2016-04 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Maynard Keynes is the great British economist of the twentieth century whose hugely influential work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and * is undoubtedly the century's most important book on economics--strongly influencing economic theory and practice, particularly with regard to the role of government in stimulating and regulating a nation's economic life. Keynes's work has undergone significant revaluation in recent years, and "Keynesian" views which have been widely defended for so long are now perceived as at odds with Keynes's own thinking. Recent scholarship and research has demonstrated considerable rivalry and controversy concerning the proper interpretation of Keynes's works, such that recourse to the original text is all the more important. Although considered by a few critics that the sentence structures of the book are quite incomprehensible and almost unbearable to read, the book is an essential reading for all those who desire a basic education in economics. The key to understanding Keynes is the notion that at particular times in the business cycle, an economy can become over-productive (or under-consumptive) and thus, a vicious spiral is begun that results in massive layoffs and cuts in production as businesses attempt to equilibrate aggregate supply and demand. Thus, full employment is only one of many or multiple macro equilibria. If an economy reaches an underemployment equilibrium, something is necessary to boost or stimulate demand to produce full employment. This something could be business investment but because of the logic and individualist nature of investment decisions, it is unlikely to rapidly restore full employment. Keynes logically seizes upon the public budget and government expenditures as the quickest way to restore full employment. Borrowing the * to finance the deficit from private households and businesses is a quick, direct way to restore full employment while at the same time, redirecting or siphoning

Download or read book Gone Tomorrow written by Heather Rogers and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A galvanizing exposé” of America’s trash problem from plastic in the ocean to “wasteful packaging, bogus recycling, and flawed landfills and incinerators” (Booklist, starred review). Eat a take-out meal, buy a pair of shoes, or read a newspaper, and you’re soon faced with a bewildering amount of garbage. The United States is the planet’s number-one producer of trash. Each American throws out 4.5 pounds daily. But garbage is also a global problem. Today, the Pacific Ocean contains six times more plastic waste than zooplankton. How did we end up with this much rubbish, and where does it all go? Journalist and filmmaker Heather Rogers answers these questions by taking readers on a grisly and fascinating tour through the underworld of garbage. Gone Tomorrow excavates the history of rubbish handling from the nineteenth century to the present, pinpointing the roots of today’s waste-addicted society. With a “lively authorial voice,” Rogers draws connections between modern industrial production, consumer culture, and our throwaway lifestyle (New York Press). She also investigates the politics of recycling and the export of trash to poor countries, while offering a potent argument for change. “A clear-thinking and peppery writer, Rogers presents a galvanizing exposé of how we became the planet’s trash monsters. . . . [Gone Tomorrow] details everything that is wrong with today’s wasteful packaging, bogus recycling, and flawed landfills and incinerators. . . . Rogers exhibits black-belt precision.” —Booklist, starred review

Download or read book Waste written by Brian Thill and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-09-24 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it's also waste-or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear waste, climate debris, pop-culture rubbish, digital detritus, and more. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Download or read book On Garbage written by John Scanlan and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2005-03 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Garbage is the first book to examine the detritus of Western culture in full range—not only material waste and ruin, but also residual or "broken" knowledge and the lingering remainders of cultural thought systems.

Download or read book Junk written by Gillian Whiteley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trash, garbage, rubbish, dross, and detritus - in this enjoyably radical exploration of 'Junk', Gillian Whiteley rethinks art's historical and present appropriation of junk within our eco-conscious and globalised culture. She does this through an illustrated exploration of particular materials, key moments and locations and the telling of a panoply of trash narratives. Found and ephemeral materials are primarily associated with assemblage - object-based practices which emerged in the mid-1950s and culminated in the seminal exhibition 'The Art of Assemblage' in New York in 1961. With its deployment of the discarded and the filthy, Whiteley argues, assemblage has been viewed as a disruptive, transgressive artform that engaged with narratives of social and political dissent, often in the face of modernist condemnation as worthless kitsch. In the Sixties, parallel techniques flourished in Western Europe, the US and Australia but the idiom of assemblage and the re-use of found materials and objects - with artist as bricoleur - is just as prevalent now. This is a timely book that uncovers the etymology of waste and the cultures of disposability within these economies of wealth.

Download or read book The Final Theory written by Mark McCutcheon and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2010 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A key unresolved issue lies at the heart of our science -- the quest of Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Hawking and many others, now widely known as the Theory of Everything. This ultimate understanding is expected to transform science and resolve its many mysteries -- all via one single overlooked principle in nature that will explain, simplify and unify everything. This quest has produced theories such as Special Relativity, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, enormous investments in powerful particle accelerators and space telescopes, and such recent pursuits as "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy." But enormous problems remain: these theories, projects and pursuits are all completely separate and frequently incompatible, presenting unresolved abstractions, speculation, paradoxes and mysteries that often even violate our laws of physics, upon closer examination. As a result, the Theory of Everything continues to elude us, with no clear way forward. The Final Theory clearly shows why this is the case, exposing centuries of well-intentioned but misguided scientific thought that has locked us into an erroneous and highly troubled energy-based science that has taken us far off track. It corrects the errors in our scientific legacy, showing that energy is actually a misunderstanding of the unifying principle we have sought for centuries -- a principle that is active all around us, producing all known phenomena such as gravity, light, electricity and magnetism. This new understanding replaces both Newton's "gravitational force" theory and Einstein's "warped space-time" General Relativity Theory, while also overturning such theories as Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. In their place is a single simple principle that finally demystifies, explains and unifies everything. Read The Final Theory and judge for yourself whether the Theory of Everything has finally arrived!

Download or read book Waste of a Nation written by Assa Doron and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-26 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In India, you can still find the kabaadiwala, the rag-and-bone man. He wanders from house to house buying old newspapers, broken utensils, plastic bottles—anything for which he can get a little cash. This custom persists and recreates itself alongside the new economies and ecologies of consumer capitalism. Waste of a Nation offers an anthropological and historical account of India’s complex relationship with garbage. Countries around the world struggle to achieve sustainable futures. Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey argue that in India the removal of waste and efforts to reuse it also lay waste to the lives of human beings. At the bottom of the pyramid, people who work with waste are injured and stigmatized as they deal with sewage, toxic chemicals, and rotting garbage. Terrifying events, such as atmospheric pollution and childhood stunting, that touch even the wealthy and powerful may lead to substantial changes in practices and attitudes toward sanitation. And innovative technology along with more effective local government may bring about limited improvements. But if a clean new India is to emerge as a model for other parts of the world, a “binding morality” that reaches beyond the current environmental crisis will be required. Empathy for marginalized underclasses—Dalits, poor Muslims, landless migrants—who live, almost invisibly, amid waste produced predominantly for the comfort of the better-off will be the critical element in India’s relationship with waste. Solutions will arise at the intersection of the traditional and the cutting edge, policy and practice, science and spirituality.