[Geogwaste] 2nd CFP AAG 2017: Informality, legitimacy and authority in the age of the “Circular Economy"

[Freyja Knapp]

Apologies for cross-posting!

Informality, legitimacy and authority in the age of the “Circular Economy”

Call for Papers, AAG 2017 Boston

Organizers:

Freyja Knapp, University of California, Berkeley

Manisha Anantharaman, St. Mary’s College of California


The circular economy is the “new kid on the block” in the arena of
technological and managerial responses to intensified waste production and
resource shortages. Circular economy strategists seek to apply technical
and design solutions to improve resource efficiency, reuse, and
repurposing, hoping for new waves of economic growth even in times of
crisis. In parallel, the urban infrastructure needed for circular resource
flows is being remade through processes of zoning and land use regulation
in concert with waves of gentrification and displacement. This session
seeks to explore the relationship between the growing activity and interest
in the circular economy (a subset of the “green” or sustainable economy)
with contemporary urban conflicts over so-called “nuisance” land uses,
commodity property rights (e.g. who owns curbside recyclables), race, and
class. These conflicts recapitulate familiar patterns of dispossession or
appropriation, but with a green-economy gloss that often masks
socio-environmental injustices.

Critical engagement with circular economy ideas and practice is of essence,
especially as the concept has recently gained prominence as a global
sustainability strategy attractive to policymakers and businesses. In this
eagerness to realize the “win-win” solutions that the circular economy
promises, the socio-spatial practices that comprise circularity occur in
the shadows of the excited claims of sustainable development and
consumption, eliding the politics of expertise and practice embedded in
urban re-cycling work.

This panel seeks to add to the growing critical scholarship on the green
economy and invites researchers studying discards, recycling, repurposing
and allied processes from a critical perspective to explore the hidden
effects of the circular economy transition. We are particularly interested
in scholarship that seeks to trouble the North-South distinction in
waste/discard studies. Some themes that we seek to explore include, but are
not limited to:


   1.

   How is the circular economy conceptualized across different places?
   2.

   What physical, policy, and labor infrastructures articulate with the
   circular economy, and how are they changing?
   3.

   How are waste gleaning/picking and recycling activities in the so-called
   “informal sector” articulating with new urban structures under the banner
   of circular economy?
   4.

   What are parallels or contradictions between the unlicensed waste
   collection economies in the global North and the global South?
   5.

   What does sustainability and justice mean within a circular/green
   economy?
   6.

   What spatial politics are at work with “cleaning and greening up” the
   city?
   7.

   How are patterns of economic development and gentrification intersecting
   with already-existing circularities?
   8.

   How are notions of authority, expertise, or rights leveraged in
   contestations over who may legitimately participate in the green economy,
   and how?
   9.

   How can we rethink “informality” through the circular economy?


Abstracts (250 words) should be sent to Freyja Knapp freyja at berkeley.edu
and Manisha Anantharaman ma20 at stmarys-ca.edu by October 21. We will notify
accepted participants by October 24. The deadline to submit abstracts to
the AAG Annual Meeting is October 27.


-- 




*Freyja Knapp, MLA Environmental PlanningDesignated Emphases, Science
and Technology Studies <http://cstms.berkeley.edu/> & Global
Metropolitan Studies <http://metrostudies.berkeley.edu/>PhD Candidate, Dept
of Environmental Science, Policy & ManagementUniversity of California,
Berkeleyemail: freyja (at) berkeley (dot) edu*

*New Publication*
Knapp F (2016) The birth of the flexible mine: Changing geographies of
mining and the e-waste commodity frontier
<http://epn.sagepub.com/content/48/10/1889?etoc>. *Environment and Planning
A*, 48(10): 1889-1909, doi: 10.1177/0308518X16652398 (accepted version here
<https://www.academia.edu/25838091/The_birth_of_the_flexible_mine_Changing_geographies_of_mining_and_the_e-waste_commodity_frontier>
)
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