Introduction at the workshop Containers and Waste: Ordering the Unruly

Our presentation introduces the container perspective and its relationship to waste. Drawing on the recent literature on containers (Shryock and Smail, 2017; Høyer Leivestad and Markkula, 2021), we outline the key analytical and theoretical directions for approaching discard and waste through the container perspective. We pay attention to a transformative potential of containers, their content, and the practices and regimes of containment. This potential relates to themes such as materiality, temporality, scale, value, and classification, which already received attention in waste and discard studies. The container perspective, we argue, offers a new angle for tracing relations and regimes that were previously less obvious. Our research experience with municipal and military waste respectively enables us to explore what a journey of ‘thinking with’ containment and containers might look like.

More info about the workshop here.