Jennifer Gabrys

Gay Hawkins

Mike Michael

From food punnets to credit cards, plastic facilitates every part of our daily lives. It has become central to processes of contemporary socio-material living. Universalised and abstracted, it is often treated as the passive object of political deliberations, or a problematic material demanding human management. But in what ways might a 'politics of plastics' deal with both its specific manifestation in particular artefacts and events, and its complex dispersed heterogeneity? Accumulation explores the vitality and complexity of plastic. This interdisciplinary collection focuses on how the presence and recalcitrance of plastic reveals the relational exchanges across human and synthetic materialities. It captures multiplicity by engaging with the processual materialities or plasticity of plastic. Through a series of themed essays on plastic materialities, plastic economies, plastic bodies and new articulations of plastic, the editors and chapter authors examine specific aspects of plastic in action. How are multiple plastic realities enacted? What are their effects? This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, human and cultural geography, environmental studies, consumption studies, science and technology studies, design, and political theory.

The Material Politics of Plastic

Accumulation

Looks at contemporary society and its treatment of waste products, offering a meditation on what we throw out, how we do it, and the ethical significance of waste in everyday life.

How We Relate to Rubbish

The Ethics of Waste

Tony Bennett

Greg Noble

Ben Dibley

The increasing significance of managing or changing habits is evident across a range of pressing contemporary issues: climate change, waste management, travel practices, and crowd control. Assembling and Governing Habits engages with the diverse ways in which habits are governed through the knowledge practices and technologies that have been brought to bear on them. The volume addresses three main concerns. The first focuses on how the habit discourses proposed by a range of disciplines have informed the ways in which different forms of expertise have shaped the ways in which habits have been managed or changed to bring about specific social objectives. The second concerns the ways in which habits are acted on as aspects of infrastructures which constitute the interfaces through which technical systems, human conducts and environments are acted on simultaneously. The third concerns the specific ways in which habit discourses and habit infrastructures are brought together in the regulation of ‘city habits’: that is, habits which have specific qualities arising out of the specific conditions – the rhythms and densities – of urban life and ones which, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been profoundly disrupted. Written in a clear and direct style, the book will appeal to students and scholars with an interest in cultural studies, sociology, cultural geography, history of the sciences, and posthuman studies.

Assembling and Governing Habits

Emily Potter

Kane Race

How and why branded bottles of water have insinuated themselves into our daily lives, and what the implications are for safe urban water supplies. How did branded bottles of water insinuate themselves into our daily lives? Why did water become an economic good—no longer a common resource but a commercial product, in industry parlance a “fast moving consumer good,” or FMCG? Plastic Water examines the processes behind this transformation. It goes beyond the usual political and environmental critiques of bottled water to investigate its multiplicity, examining a bottle of water's simultaneous existence as, among other things, a product, personal health resource, object of boycotts, and part of accumulating waste matter. Throughout, the book focuses on the ontological dimensions of drinking bottled water—the ways in which this habit enacts new relations and meanings that may interfere with other drinking water practices. The book considers the assemblage and emergence of a mass market for water, from the invention of the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle in 1973 to the development of “hydration science” that accompanied the rise of jogging in the United States. It looks at what bottles do in the world, tracing drinking and disposal practices in three Asian cities with unreliable access to safe water: Bangkok, Chennai, and Hanoi. And it considers the possibility of ethical drinking, examining campaigns to “say no” to the bottle and promote the consumption of tap water in Canada, the United States, and Australia.

Gay Hawkins

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