Lecture: Wasteocene, Stories from the Global Dump
by Marco Armiero
as part of the The Sustainable Development Festival
Short bio
Marco Armiero is an environmental historian, currently working as the Director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm. He is also Director of Researcher at the Institute for Studies on the Mediterranean, National Research Council, in Italy. Marco has been a post-doctoral fellow and visiting scholar at Yale University, UC Berkeley, Stanford, the Autonomous University in Barcelona, and the Center for Social Sciences at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He has been selected as the Barron Visiting Professor of Environmental Humanities by Princeton University.
He has worked on the nationalization of nature, migrations and environment, fascism and nature, and environmental justice. With his research, Marco has contributed to bridging environmental humanities and political ecology. Since 2019 he is the elected president of the European Society for Environmental History. In 2021, Cambridge University Press has published his new volume Wasteocene. Stories from the Global Dump (translated into Italian in the same year).
Abstract
Humans may live in the Anthropocene, but this does not affect all in the same way. How would the Anthropocene look if, instead of searching its traces in the geosphere, researchers would look for them in the organosphere, in the ecologies of humans in their entanglements with the environment? Looking at this embodied stratigraphy of power and toxicity, more than the Anthropocene, we will discover the Wasteocene. The imposition of wasting relationships on subaltern human and more-than-human communities implies the construction of toxic ecologies made of contaminating substances and narratives. While official accounts have systematically erased any trace of those wasting relationships, another kind of narrative has been written in flesh blood, and cells. Traveling between Naples (Italy) and Agbogbloshie (Ghana), science fiction and epidemic outbreaks, this talk will take the readers into the bowels of the Wasteocene, but it will also indicate the commoning practices which are dismantling it.
