Anthropocenic Discards: Infrastructural Labors and Uncanny Exposures at Dakar’s Dump
As infrastructures of wasted materials and disposable people, waste dumps may be the signature archive of the Anthropocene. At once the most stigmatized of urban labor and at the same time, a service essential to facilitating the onward march of urban modernity, waste picking labor is, then, a sort of Anthropocenic work par excellence. This talk examines ethnographically the provocations for understandings of the Anthropocene posed by infrastructures of picking labor at Dakar’s massive, unplanned (sauvage) garbage dump, Mbeubeuss. In the context of an impending plan financed by the World Bank to “modernize” the dump, it examines the production of value, as well as bodily, spiritual, and ontological (in)security embedded in these infrastructures of disposability. Close exploration of the delicate relationships entailed in picking labor illuminates the forms of living and being carved out in uncanny ecologies yoking the human, natural, and otherworldly on a damaged planet. Through grappling with how pickers apprehend and navigate exposure to biochemical and social toxicities, the intervention endeavors to render the violences of the Anthropocene visible and offer new provocations for how socio-material relationships may be revalued.
Date: 23 February 2021, 14:30 (Tuesday, 6th week, Hilary 2021)
Venue: Venue to be announced
Speaker: Rosalind Fredericks (The Gallatin School, NYU)
Organising department: School of Geography and the Environment
Organiser: Dr Ariell Ahearn (School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: ariell.ahearn@ouce.ox.ac.uk
Part of: SoGE Economy and Society Cluster Events
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcoceCqqzguGdYOt914J3Wmi1NNivw7RF0V
Booking email: ariell.ahearn@ouce.ox.ac.uk
Audience: Public
Editor: Ariell Ahearn Ligham