
Seminar Critical Development Studies, Spring 2025
Abstract
In this talk I demonstrate how waste (anti-)politics are shaped by enduring modernist fantasies of containment. I do so by scrutinizing four types of conceptual containers that are commonsensically evoked as producing and delimiting quantifiable amounts of solid waste—individual consumers, cities, countries, and continents. Grounded on terra firma with reified boundaries, these nested containers constitute a naturalized conception of waste that aligns with and reproduces developmentalist worldviews. This naturalization obscures the multinational networks of finance, extraction, and production that shape spatial materializations of waste as well as waste movements, bifurcations, and transformations that disrespect boundaries of all kinds. In short, such a perspective moves the accusation of responsibility up supply chains until arriving at entire systems and their logics. With the indictment of individualized responsibility out of the way, we can then ask a rich set of questions about everyday engagements with potential waste objects. I do so by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from an urban scrap trade within the country maligned by the World Bank to now be the largest “producer” of waste: China.
About the speaker
Adam Liebman began as an assistant professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in August 2024. He has a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from UC Davis and was previously assistant professor at DePauw University (2020-2024). His research interests span discard studies, the environmental humanities, economic anthropology, and critical development studies. He is completing a book manuscript titled Uncontained: Scrap Worlds in and Beyond China.
About the series
The Critical Development Studies Seminar Series is a graduate student-led effort that aims to provide space for junior scholars to share innovative research and discuss emergent debates within critical development studies.
Invited speakers cover a range of geographical areas, disciplinary backgrounds, and research topics. Examples of potential topics include agroecology and food justice issues, state-building, land and labor, extractivist politics, the gendered and racial dynamics of ongoing capitalist development, and the political ecological histories of the global development project. The target audience for the series is graduate students and faculty interested in critical development studies both within the Cornell community as well as external scholars.
Seminar organizers for 2024-25 are Natalia Correa Sanchez, Kyunghee Kang, Jenny Goldstein, and Mariah Doyle-Stephenson.
Date & Time
February 7, 2025
3:15 pm - 4:45 pm
Location
More information about this event.
Contact Information
Mariah Doyle-Stephenson, Administrative Assistant, Global Development
- md2237 [at] cornell.edu
Speaker
Adam Liebman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Departments
Department of Global Development
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