Good afternoon, everyone.
[BACKGROUND] Let's go ahead and get started.
My name is Lesley Moyo.
I'm the director for Research and Instructional Services
here in the University Libraries.
I would like to welcome you all
to this presentation today.
By way of remarks, I just
really want to point out a couple of
interesting notes regarding
the visible Scholarship Initiative program.
The program has been running for two years now.
[BACKGROUND]
Try that.
Can you hear me now?
Yes. [NOISE]
The volume was too low.
[BACKGROUND] Chris. Start over.
Welcome to the University Libraries.
My name is Lesley Moyo.
I'm the Director for Research and Instructional Services.
I just want to welcome you and then just speak to you a
little bit about this
visible Scholarship Initiative history.
We have been running for two years now,
featuring books and research in
the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.
During these two years,
fall and spring semesters,
of course, we have previously featured 11 authors.
Today makes the 12th.
We have one more feature coming up
next month before we wrap the semester.
It has been an interesting mix of research topics
and clearly reflecting the diversity
of research in the humanities and social sciences.
We have enjoyed participating with the authors.
Today we'll be featuring
[LAUGHTER]
Elizabeth.
I wanted to say Beth, but I wasn't sure.
Elizabeth Mazzolini.
She's actually a visiting professor
from another university.
But I will quickly turn it over to Tom to speak
about the program a little bit
more before introducing our speaker today.
Thank you for coming to participate with us.
Thanks. You just saw the limits of
my technical abilities by
turning up the volume. Thank you.
Just from a chatting earlier,
Lesley informed me that she was
going to provide a summary for fortuitous activities.
Then we're going to talk about ways to
ratchet up this program for next year,
which was not on my agenda, but I guess it is now.
[LAUGHTER] When we started this,
the idea of visible scholarship was really in my mind at
least designed to make
visible some of the stages of scholarly production,
particularly in liberal arts and human sciences,
which is often done in isolation in an office,
in our archive, in our library.
Often, the products themselves don't get a lot of
visibility because they end up in
bookshelves or they end up in
journal articles or other places.
That was really the original conception.
To my mind, it's worked really well
in terms of not only these events but the posters.
I've heard from a couple of authors,
it's disconcerting to see their faces all over campus,
which I find as a sign of success as well.
The last session with Jeff Mann and then this one
have really provided me
with a different way to think about visibility,
which is the ways in which scholarship
brings out topics and
issues that could be visible but often really aren't.
We saw this last month with Jeff's novel on
his imaginings of what life would
have been like for a gay civil rights soldier,
to gay civil rights soldiers.
We're certainly going to see that this month with
Elizabeth's work on Histories of the Dustheap,
which as we know are all around us but often not visible.
In some ways, it is up to scholars to
bring out these things.
They should be visible and could be made more
visible in ways that are really revealing.
It also made me think about the role
of libraries and recycling.
I don't just mean the stacks
of paper here in the recycling boxes
that should be all over the library are a
little often aren't exactly where you need them.
But a different kind of recycling,
which is the ways in which
books and libraries get used over and over again.
When I was coming a few minutes ago,
I had to get some books in the library.
I was looking at a couple of really well-worn books,
books that were published many years ago
that clearly had been used well,
hopefully in the ways that they've intended, perhaps not,
but just flipping through them and seeing
the annotations and the stars
on the underlining and the notes.
I know these things drive librarians crazy,
but they show that the books are being used,
and I think that's reassuring.
It's a kind of recycling that you get
also with electronic media but in a different way.
It's perhaps doesn't leave the same kind of visibility.
It's a useful way to think about where
libraries are and their roles they preserve.
Often for scholars and social sciences in humanities,
it's not about finding
materials nobody's looked at before.
It can be, but often,
the whole point of what we're researching
is to find the materials that people did
read and did use and used those as a vehicle
or an instrument to understand a sense of attitudes,
a sense of mentality.
In some ways, the more these things are being used,
the more useful they are for us as
scholars at a later stage.
I'm looking forward to the talk.
Again, we are lucky to feature
a co-edited publication because this is
often a really important part of the scholarship
that faculty do in liberal art and human sciences.
I was delighted when once again,
this was not a book I had to go find,
but it was one that was suggested to me.
That's another good sign that this
program is working well.
I'll turn it over to Elizabeth.
Let her talk about her book.
Thanks. [APPLAUSE]
Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. Can you hear me okay?
More mic.
More mic?
A little higher.
How's that? A little better? Great. It was
really fortuitous to have
this scheduled my book with Stephanie
here this week because it's
just a few days after Earth Day,
of course, which has
lost a little bit of its cultural cache.
It's certainly a time when people
start to reflect on the relationship
between individual action and
systemic change and the interaction between those,
and that's certainly one of the big themes of our book.
It's a nice coincidence that
it comes so close after Earth Day.
[NOISE] Today, I have some more and less formal remarks.
I wanted to talk a little bit
about the impetus that Stephanie
and I had to produce the book in the first place.
Then I'll tell you a little bit about the structure
and contents of the book
and a bit about the
co-authoring and co-editing experience,
which was new to both Stephanie
and I. I have to speak for Stephanie.
She's at the University of Illinois, by the way.
Then a plug for
environmental humanities scholarship in general.
First the more formal remarks about our impetus.
Our desire for the volume came
out of the simultaneous since that a lot of people
experience of environmental degradation
being a systemic issue.
Growing awareness of that,
coupled with the growing pressure on
people's individual agency to
address this systemic issue.
Maybe it's a little bit of an overstatement to say
maybe a bit of irritation with some
of the sanctimony that accompanies
pressure for individual action
to recycle and so on and so forth.
When what you do with your yogurt container,
when you're done with it matters
quite a lot less than the fact that millions of
yogurt containers were produced in the first place
and what was happening while they were being produced.
Additionally, an additional exigence for us was
just that people seem to be aware of this
and struggling with that.
I want to talk about trash and waste.
We noticed quite a lot of media on the topic,
both including popular media like No Impact Man,
there was a book and a movie created about that.
It's not just about garbage,
but definitely about individual agency and waste,
and a movie called Wasteland,
which some of you might have seen about
trash pickers in Brazil.
It seem it was on people's minds at the moment.
Waste, as some people recognize,
presents a challenge to a lot of
the status quo of consumerism and
individuality that dominates practices
and modes of thinking about the environment.
When you say garbage or waste,
people often think of the discards
after consuming something like your yogurt container,
but there's quite a lot that's hidden as Tom remarks,
gestured towards the chemical runoff from manufacturing,
the poor neighborhoods that suffer the impact
of manufacturing wastes in their air and water.
The agency that's disallowed or
suppressed by all of these practices.
Even the associations with the word when
people feel like you
should recycle your yogurt container,
fall into only a limited register,
a limited idiom of this individual agency.
That seems to be a problem.
We wanted to interrupt the momentum of
that idiom or interrupt that register
a little bit by producing
a cross-disciplinary conversation among
experts in different academic fields,
and explore the binaries that seemed to have
been kept separate and keep us locked into
those problematic idioms and registers.
[NOISE] Binaries between individual and
community, local and global,
economic and ecological consumption and production,
and historical and contemporary.
We wanted to explore
interaction between all of those systems.
We focused on garbage in
particular because, in many ways,
it's a perfect sign of a problem of thinking about
scale and trying to
think in a new way because of the problems of scale.
Everyone knows what garbage is when they see it,
but every bit of garbage we see
littering the streets is produced by
a vast network of productive forces that's
nearly unthinkable in their reach and power.
Dealing with garbage, making it,
sorting it, responding to it is something everyone does,
but our ability to
distance ourselves from having to work and live with
garbage is one of
the easiest ways and most immediate ways we can see how
global capitalism actually turn
some people in forms of agency into waste or garbage.
Garbage is a record of lost histories and
register of who counts as fully human.
Yet on a day-to-day basis,
it is in its smallest and largest incarnations
a sign of environmental crisis writ both large and small.
Our book is founded on the premise
that if the challenge of environmental action is to
organize information in order to
make it relevant for ethical action,
the challenge of environmental scholarship
is to present what has been
specialized disciplinary defined information
to a broader cross-section of
interested and passionate readers.
[NOISE]
That's the philosophical and
contemporary impetus for writing it.
I wanted to talk just really quickly
about the structure of the book
and some of the contributions.
I said we were fairly invested in
having a cross-disciplinary conversation.
Stephanie and I are both in
English departments and so the
two of us are in English and there's
another contributor from English, Bill Gleason.
[NOISE] We had a contributor from
Communication, one from Sociology,
one from History, one
from Environment and Resource Studies,
one from Urban and Regional Planning,
and one from American studies.
They were mostly humanist,
but also from the social sciences.
We structured the book in order to draw
out some of the common questions or problems
that everybody had and also to help
eliminate disciplinary, high-bound practices.
We structured the book in order to instead
highlight the interaction between
the material and the symbolic that waste forces.
The sections are subjectivities of garbage,
the places of garbage,
and the cultural contradictions of garbage.
The subjectivity section has to do with how waste and
garbage actually impacts subjectivity.
The way people see themselves and see themselves
as political actors and agents in the world.
The places of garbage has to do with
how place is defined according
to borders that are often produced by
how people manage and accommodate waste.
Then the cultural contradictions of
garbage was the last section and that had to do
with how garbage and
waste sometimes seem to be both profit and problem,
and both a source of
enchantment as well as a source of
disgust and some other things.
There's nine chapters total.
I'll just tell you quickly the topics because they
range and I don't want to
bore you with just rehearsing it,
but just to give you an idea of the range of topics here.
Our first essay was about Love Canal in upstate New York,
and a lot of you
are familiar with that history and some of
the autobiographies of residents from
Love Canal that emerged as sources,
as tools for activism.
George Waring and women's rights back
in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Issues of how domestic homes were
connected to larger city infrastructures also were issues
of women's rights and responsibilities as
borders between the private and the public were being
formed and as those were invested with gender identities.
Stephanie's contribution is about
in viral blogging and how
people see themselves as
political agents on the Internet.
Some people catalog their waste
and their garbage and blog about it,
and other people who want to read about that, apparently.
It forms a certain community.
Scott Frickel, in the places of garbage,
wrote about New Orleans and some of
the hazardous waste that was a result of
Hurricane Katrina became managed and how
that knowledge circulated and to whom and for whom.
Phaedra Pezzullo's contribution is about Bloomington,
Indiana where she lives and how PCBs from electronics
manufacturing were becoming a danger to the community,
and so how the community found
agency in order to respond to the PCBs.
My own contribution is about Mount Everest.
You hear frequently about how
there's so much garbage on
Mount Everest and it's been so trashed.
But there's actually quite a lot
of uncertainty about that,
and I think that uncertainty has
been capitalized on quite a bit,
and that's what my chapter's on.
The last section in the cultural contradictions of
garbage we have Daniel Schneider,
he's our urban and regional planner,
talks about Milwaukee and
the fascinating history of
the way Milwaukee has tried to manage its sludge,
which I guess is like the the afterthought of
the Laverne & Shirley [LAUGHTER] beer manufacturing.
Hoping you can picture the sludge that comes out at
the end of the beer. I like Laverne & Shirley.
Anyway, Milwaukee over the years has apparently tried to
both capitalize on its sludge
and find ways of managing it.
Jennifer Clapp talks about
the plastics industry which insidiously has
played a huge part in making disposal
of plastics your job rather than their job.
As plastics manufacturing ramped up,
there was a lot of secretive support
of promoting an ideology of
consumer responsibility
rather than industry responsibility.
Lastly, probably my favorite essay
in the book is Marisol Cortez's.
She writes about The Brave Little Toaster,
a Disney movie from the '80s,
which is obsolete by now.
It hasn't come out on DVD,
it's only been on VHS
and the movie is about obsolescence.
The movie asks you to, maybe I'm wrong,
maybe it's on DVD now, I'm not sure,
but it wasn't at the time of her writing.
The movie asks you to be enchanted
with objects that are otherwise obsolete
and tries to suggest that maybe new relationships with
our objects that we might otherwise throw
out as possible or thinkable.
That's the gist of the book basically,
and also just wanted
to say a couple things about co-editing and coauthoring,
because neither Stephanie nor I had
ever done anything like that before,
and so it was quite an adventure.
But I really encourage anybody who has interest in it.
I think the goal which neither of us ever
mastered was not to take anything personally,
but that's the goal to try to
keep in mind, and we managed.
Stephanie has gone on. She's going
a little bit further with garbage.
My work is taking a different turn,
but she's started a journal.
By the way, for those of you who are interested
in environmental humanities issues,
the journal is called Resilience.
It's just like this book is,
it's invested in non-specialized language,
so conversations between people in different disciplines.
If you google Resilience:
Journal of Environmental Humanities,
you'll see it, and it's a great new project.
They're hoping for lots of great contributions.
That's it for my spiel,
but I'm happy to take some questions.
I'm not sure what kinds of things you're
interested in or what you want to hear about.
But I would like to hear that.
I'm happy to take questions or not.
I'll make a remark.
Yeah.
I don't know if it rings through with you or not.
The origin of the term garbology. You heard it?
I've heard a legend.
The question is, I'm
repeating questions for the recording,
the origin of the term garbology.
I've heard a legend. Have you heard the legend?
Probably.
That a stalker of Bob Dylan?
I guess in the '60s maybe or maybe the '70s.
Mid '60s
Okay. Went through Bob Dylan's garbage.
Celebrity stalkers go through celebrity garbages.
He would document Bob Dylan's garbage,
and I can't remember his name now,
but he called himself a garbologist.
[LAUGHTER] Yeah.
Now, there's a whole little subculture
of garbologists [LAUGHTER] who document garbage.
Thanks. Yes. Question.
Yeah, I want to ask if I can ask about the title [inaudible]
Yeah.
Right. [LAUGHTER]
Yeah. [LAUGHTER] No, I don't.
But if you had been listening,
you would know that's the wrong question to ask.
[LAUGHTER] The title is a flip, a play,
a chiasmus on the well-known formulation,
"the dust heap of history,"
which now I'm going to forget that story.
Reagan, I think, popularized it at
some point talking about the Soviet Bloc countries,
and I think it originally originated with Lenin,
as far as I remember.
History does invoke
a particular academic discipline for sure.
We do have one historian aboard,
but what we were hoping to do there
was not only play on the well-known phrase the Dust Heap
of History and the things that are forgotten
being resuscitated and brought
to light and brought new knowledge of,
but I think we
weren't thinking of history proper, of course.
But discourses of the Dust Heap doesn't
sound that awesome [LAUGHTER].
I think the investment was more in
the chiasmatic play than in the actual history.
Are there questions or comments? Yeah, Tom.
You have a Russian historian here?
Great, thanks.
I was asking this,
saying the liberals after the rest of
revolution saying go where you belong back to dust being.
Thanks.
Again with the idea of a very much history
of theology history is moving forward,
people who have been by passed by history,
by not socialists but liberals,
should just fall by the wayside.
Reagan picks that up in respect to communism.
[BACKGROUND] But I'm curious because and I forget the Russian term but it's usually translated as "dust bin"
it's kind of an anachronistic term. I would say dust heap is also so I'm curious why not garbage?
It was Stephanie's title [LAUGHTER] and I liked it.
[OVERLAPPING].
Stephanie is a historian and not a poet.
[LAUGHTER] Yeah, right. That's a good question.
Honestly, Stephanie came up with
the title and it sounded great with me,
so we didn't really talk about it.
But again, I think we're more
interested in the invocations and
resonances of it than the literalness of it.
Thanks. [BACKGROUND] I thought I saw
other hands or comments, no?. Okay. Yeah.
I don't know how relevant this but
the Liberal Test theory is on Netflix.
It is? [LAUGHTER] That's great.
We own it on VHS,
that in itself is obsolete [LAUGHTER] and when Elijah
watched it we had to
go hook up the VCR issue
of obsolescence in there [LAUGHTER].
Right, yeah, that's what
her essay talks about a little bit. Yeah.
I have a question about marketing. Right now
the library is working on marketing,
so we conducted an interview in the morning,
am thinking about marketing and
how this is being marketed
MIT put it in a series,
since I'm in English,
It's called urban and industrial environments.
The series editors do not have
the English background that Stephanie and I both do,
but I believe they had published
the monograph of one of our contributors.
I think the fit with that series was not via English,
but via some of
the social scientists that we are working with.
One could be mislead by
the history thinking where we are getting into
archaeology and we're writing about
what we can go there and find, that kind of evidence.
Right. There's been one review
so far that we've seen that was
by an environmental magazine
in the UK and they loved the book,
but they hated the cut.
Their objection was to the cover.
They said it was too gross.
[LAUGHTER] They said it
was a shame because it was such a great book,
but no one would buy it because they'd be
so turned off by the cover.
I think that they also marketed it.
They had an Earth Day promotional also,
and Stephanie and I wrote for the MIT blog.
I think it's largely being marketed
for interdisciplinary and
cross-disciplinary environmental humanities.
I'll have to look and see what the key words are.
Yeah.
When you said the word enchantment, [inaudible] ,
the cover
captures that [inaudible].
It's an art of a fairly well-known artist,
whose name is escaping me now, ALT, I believe.
Scarborough known garbage Art we wanted
to use. Yeah. Phil.
The contributors are already interested in garbage.
Thanks.
Some, yes. About half
knew each of us contributed contributors.
Scott Frickel who wrote about
the New Orleans waste, for example,
he was already writing on waste and New Orleans,
and I knew him and knew that we could ask them for that.
They were all working on environmental things,
but the essays were produced for the volume.
They were working on things around garbage at least.
Like Bill Gleason's piece,
he works on space in nineteenth-century America.
His piece is about women's space of
the home and the connection between
the home and the urban infrastructure.
It turned out that because he was working on space,
he also knew about this issue of waste regarding space.
It turns out garbage touches everything
[LAUGHTER] It was a combination of friends, colleagues,
and people that we knew who at
least we're environmentally minded,
easily and interestedly produced
essays about garbage for it.
Yeah, But surprisingly people are more
interested in it than you would think actually
[LAUGHTER].
They're interested when you
all of a sudden give them an opportunity,
like they've been waiting for the opportunity.
Yeah, Emily
I was interested in a question about methodology,
I was intrigued by the description of your article,
not everything it was rumored to
be and yet there was skepticism around it.
Did you like it
[LAUGHTER] or how did you tease out what
was going on in there?
No. I've certainly never been there.
I noticed a disconnect
between more high profile announcements of
how much garbage there was
and a specialized climbing literature,
all the structures that
are in place to prevent garbage from accumulating.
There's a lot of money to be made
from leading expeditions,
and so there's quite a lot of literal investment
in making an expedition a pleasant experience.
Those investments seem to be in
contrast with a popular press saying,
"It's the world's largest
junkyard," and things like that.
What I did then was notice that this junk and
notice the different investments
in those different claims,
and draw my conclusion of uncertainty on that,
that it's not
just easy positivistic claim that you can make.
Eyewitness claims are also
unreliable because the mountain,
it looks different in May than it does in April,
even, and in different times of year.
Temporally and according to different investments,
it's just not necessarily reliable.
I think going based
on that and following the investments.
What are the investments of
the large popular press reports
of its being totally literate?
Does that feedback into
your concern with the singular moments
of trash rather than worrying about Mt.
Everest and not worrying about arguing
your investment that surround us everyday [inaudible]?
A bit because I think some of the
popular press claims feed that sense of
self-righteousness and of people's feeling
like the individual needs to take
a stand and go up and pick up power bar wrappers,
and because there's also some less
than ethical expedition leaders that
will claim that you're joining
an ecological expedition in order to attract people,
and money, and sponsorship, and things like that.
I think it feeds
that sanctimony to overstate a little bit,
that this is a problem that needs to be solved
with people feeling good about themselves.
I'm sure somebody somewhere
would argue with me about that,
but [LAUGHTER] that was my feeling or claim.
Yeah, Heather.
How do you describe the process [inaudible]?
The process that?
The process that you and
your co-editor used to edit the book [inaudible] places,
in one place, in one virtual place?
I keep forgetting to
repeat the questions for the recording.
The question was, how we physically or
logistically managed the co-editing process? It was hard.
during the process of producing it,
I changed jobs and moved and had a baby and Stephanie
had her things going on.
Besides the normal, there was lots
of problems [LAUGHTER] or opportunities rather.
I wanted to use Dropbox.
[LAUGHTER] Stephanie did not.
That was a little bit of a problem.
We ended up emailing.
But we not only co-edited but we
co-authored the introduction and the conclusion also.
We did try to make some use of
file-sharing software and ended
up also emailing essays back
and forth with layers and layers and layers
and layers of track changes like blinding,
spectrum of colors, of
how many layers on the track changes.
It was just completely ad
hoc since neither of us had done
it before and very much just the seat of our pants.
We used a couple of different methods.
We Skyped and talked on the phone quite a bit.
I think the next time we did it and we
enjoyed it and we'll do it again for sure.
But I think the next time we did it,
we probably try to manage it a little bit better,
have some set system in place
like Dropbox or something like that.
But there were times that we would
each have to take responsibility first.
We just divided up the essays or would
send the version of the intro that we
had done and wait for it.
It's actually really gratifying process because
there's a long time that you don't have to do stuff.
[LAUGHTER] You're just waiting
for the other person to respond and it's really amazing
how your writing can flourish in someone
else's hands back and forth and how we
could really just draw out each other's strengths.
There was points that we sort of trade it
off being like the big idea person versus
the detail person and it
ended up working really well. Yeah, Emmet.
I may have to follow up on an earlier question [inaudible]?
[LAUGHTER] The question is, what does the book
suggest you do with this?
It doesn't make any specific prescriptions but,
certainly, I would say that recycling,
it makes you a nice person.
That's great and everybody likes a nice person.
But that ultimately, recycling is
a private act in a lot of
ways and we were trying to draw
attention to public issues of it.
Like if you lived in a neighborhood where
[NOISE] these were being manufactured,
perhaps you could find, as the community,
that phage I wrote about in Bloomington, Indiana,
you could find some political agency with
your neighbors or find some ways
around the way that
your political agency was being suppressed.
You could vote and interact with your politicians,
ask for various kinds of
environmental standards or changes.
People vote with their grocery bill,
with their grocery dollars also, of course.
So the $64 million question is,
what's the relationship between
individual action and systemic change?
I'm not sure that it's
just a whole bunch of
people deciding to do the same thing but sometimes it is.
That's the question, what do you do with the bottle?
I mean, it's a problem that's there in the first place.
[inaudible] option that you
didn't mention is that
maybe you would decide not to buy it in the first place.
That maybe you could decide not to
buy it in the first place.
Yeah. I mean, that's easier said than done.
We're dependent on so much.
We're aware of the limited nature of fossil fuels,
for example, but we don't have
a choice not to drive often.
There's a lot about the infrastructure of
our lives that compels these kinds of things.
It's worth opening a conversation about
how we could be otherwise compelled.
[NOISE]
[LAUGHTER] Great. Oh, good, thanks.
[OVERLAPPING] There's is one necessary
for the records and
there's one just before
you go through the security gates.
There is a place you can put all of your recycled books.
Great.
One thing that library could do
is to fix the water faucets. [OVERLAPPING]
Nice. [OVERLAPPING]
I know, but I'm just a little short [OVERLAPPING].
Speaking of infrastructure?
At least, three or four [inaudible]
[BACKGROUND] Other questions?
[NOISE] One more question, yeah?
These are the seven inclusion [inaudible] [OVERLAPPING].
Yes.
Thanks. When I said it,
I felt like I was [BACKGROUND] leading you,
I didn't mean to necessarily [LAUGHTER] plant that.
I'm interested in poverty,
in particular, so it's not unrelated.
I was interested in poverty before
this project, certainly also,
but I feel like it's the very beginning, early stages,
but in particular, in the ways that the
poor are blamed often for some of the world's ills,
whether it's via obesity or drug use or things like that.
I think, in particular, poverty is
related to environmentalism in the landscape.
There's a great new book out by Rob Nixon,
it's called ''Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of
the Poor,'' so they're certainly related.
I'm interested in how poverty's
helped shape the American landscape, for example.
But yeah, that's m- [OVERLAPPING].
They don't reach suburban's [inaudible] expandable
[OVERLAPPING].
Yes, indeed. [OVERLAPPING] Right.
Yes, but garbage is great too.
[LAUGHTER] Being involved in
this project and been a mother
of what I assume is a fairly young child,
did it change any of the decisions you made,
your parenting decisions,
there's disposable vs cloth diapers.
[inaudible] your parenting decisions?
Probably, some choices like that.
I probably would have made previous to this in any case.
The fact that I prefer to use cloth diapers
is related to the fact that I wanted to do this project.
No, is part of the answer to the question,
but it did change my relationship to
those questions because [BACKGROUND]
I'm working so hard [NOISE] against
the idea that
these individual choices should be moralized.
That's our problem.
Maybe before I would've been judgmental
about people who did use [NOISE] whatever.
I'm not, I probably wouldn't been.
But just to overstate it for the sake of example like,
if I would have been judgmental about
people who use paper diapers before.
I'm not now, as a result of working because
I understand the range in
which people have to make choices is very small compared
to the systems that
make those choices make sense and possible,
and we use plenty of paper diapers also.
I think, it changed my relationship
to how to talk about them rather than,
specifically, like what to do?
How we could talk about?
Whether it should just be on one, overextended,
exhausted, short of money parent
to save the environment, that seems unlikely.
It just changed the way I thought about it, I think.
[BACKGROUND] Those are great question,
so it's quick judgment.
[LAUGHTER] Fix the water faucet.
Fix the water faucets.
[LAUGHTER] Do you have any thoughts
about how to develop agency, systemic changes?
The question is, if I have ideas [NOISE] about
how to change sense of
agency [OVERLAPPING] develop it in
the face of these sublimely,
in the bad way, unthinkable issues.
I think, people's agencies
emerge among material conditions.
[NOISE] I think that,
you feel like things are possible
because what your life is
like and what's in front of your face?
I think that, [BACKGROUND] trying to change
agency first is a better reverse question, I think,
that material conditions need to be
changed first in order to change the sense of agency,
and that's the $64 million question too.
I mean, that's just my philosophical answer.
But if you had plentiful drinking fountains, for example,
and not these available,
that changes like how you take
care of your body and how you relate to the Earth.
It's not just about like
the things change because people will it,
but people will things because of how things are?
Again, this is very abstract, but I don't.
I think, that's the $64 million question,
but I do think it's related to circumstances.
[NOISE] But
circumstances don't just magically- [OVERLAPPING]
Right, I know.
It's a chicken or egg, it is.
[BACKGROUND] I wish I [LAUGHTER] could tell you.
[LAUGHTER] I mean, some of the examples from the book,
communities getting together in order to draw attention
to corporation's bad behavior,
for example, and Phaedrus essay on Bloomington,
[NOISE] or some of the Love Canal residents who wrote
autobiographies that traveled widely,
and we're able to draw attention.
Sometimes, even the traditional modes of
agency can find momentum,
and gain purchase for people,
and help them change them in infrastructure,
which then can change people's sense of possibility,
and inspire other people a sense of possibility too.
My collaborator in here,
Phaedrus talks about toxic towards people,
take tours of toxic places.
There's a certain sense of knowledge of some
of these places contributing to people's sense of agency,
and outrage, and things to be done too.
[NOISE] Yes?
Thank you [OVERLAPPING] It's wonderful to
hear about your work.
I'm curious about the editorial decision
for all the cases to be American-centric.
Particularly, when [OVERLAPPING] we hear so much
about it with really [OVERLAPPING]
dramatic global clarifications on
this problem [OVERLAPPING] Especially when,
you're saying,
recycling of electronics [OVERLAPPING] saying,
that's pretty good.
Right. The question is
about the American focus of most of
their contributions and [NOISE] especially given
the global nature of waste, and garbage.
That might be a bit of an accident,
an editorial accident, rather than a choice.
It might, if you be just based
on the people as Stephanie and
I knew in American Studies.
That's another volume perhaps.
We are beginning with
[BACKGROUND] some of the things that we knew about,
and the people that we knew,
and what they were working on,
and another volume of that would be great.
I have mentioned a movie Wasteland and there's
some other similar movies that have
to trade in global garbage.
There's barges trucking garbage back and forth.
Jennifer Clapp, one of the essayist.
She's Canadian and she does talk about
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and some
more of the global trade in garbage.
But yeah, that's a really important aspect of it.
[BACKGROUND].
That's it.
Thank you very much.
Thanks everybody. [APPLAUSE]