Ecology and labour in the circuit of culture

Abstract

Many of us have drawn on the now classic circuit of culture to radically contextualize media technology as part of larger systems of regulation, production, consumption, representation, and identity. Although I find it generative, it long has bothered me that ecology and labour were not initially part of that framework. Discard Studies offers a compelling intervention for how we might rethink the circuit of culture by considering: what if – instead of centring a desirable capitalist commodity in our research epistemologies of media technologies – we entered through the underbelly of racialized, gendered, and ableist capitalism through undesirable materials, often located in the hidden abode away from elites, such as toxic pollution and commercial content management? Discard Studies is a collaboration between two geographers at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Max Liboiron’s Pollution as Colonialism established them as a leading critic of plastic waste and decoloniality, and Josh Lepawsky’s Reassembling Rubbish established him as a leading critic of the global trade and trafficking of e-waste. Together, they wrote Discard Studies to identify key commitments for studying what and who is discarded today, offering a ‘broad and systematic approach to how some materials, practices, regions and people are valued and devalued’ (p. 3). The Introduction opens by reflecting on how BPA (bisphenol A, a toxic synthetic chemical) circulates through cash register receipts. Troubling the traditional linear waste management regime of production-consumption-disposal, the authors map a more complex system consisting of feedback loops and exits, which involve economic, political, and material flows, interactions, and structures. Liboiron and Lepawsky then apply this framework to consider, for