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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Anthropology

Joshua Reno

2016

Materiality

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Waste And Waste Management, Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Waste And Waste Management, Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

Discard studies have demonstrated that waste is more than just a symptom of an all-too-human demand for meaning or a merely technical problem for sanitary engineers and public health officials. The afterlife of waste materials and processes of waste management reveal the centrality of transient and discarded things for questions of materiality and ontology and marginal and polluting labor and environmental justice movements, as well as for critiques of the exploitation and deferred promises of modernity and imperial formations. There is yet more waste will tell us, especially as more studies continue to document the many ways that our wastes …


Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure: The Politics Of Value At A Michigan Landfill , Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure: The Politics Of Value At A Michigan Landfill , Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

This article discusses scavenging and dumping as alternative approaches to deriving value from rubbish at a large Michigan landfill. Both practices are attuned to the indeterminacy and power of abandoned things, but in different ways. Whereas scavenging relies on acquiring familiarity with an object by getting to know its particular qualities, landfilling and other forms of mass disposal make discards fungible and manipulable by stripping them of their former identities. By way of examining the different ways in which people become invested in the politics of value at the landfill, whether as part of expressions of gender and class or …


Technically Speaking: On Equipping And Evaluating “Unnatural” Language Learners , Joshua Reno Oct 2016

Technically Speaking: On Equipping And Evaluating “Unnatural” Language Learners , Joshua Reno

Joshua Reno

This article compares different communicative trials for apes in captivity and children with autism in order to investigate how ideological assumptions about linguistic agency and impairment are constructed and challenged in practice. To the extent that Euro-American techniques of “unnatural” language instruction developed during the Cold War era have been successful, it is because communicative interactions are broken down into basic components, and would-be language learners are equipped with materials, devices, and habits that make up for their distinct bio/social deficits. Such linguistic equipment can present a challenge to the ideological presumption of a subject inherently gifted with the rudiments …