ICS Seminar Series - Dr Geir Henning Presterudstuen, Professor Gay Hawkins and Professor Brett Neilson
Date: Thursday, 22 April 2021
Time: 11:30am-1:00pm
Venue: The seminar will be hosted as a Hybrid event and will be held in person at WSU Parramatta South Campus, as well as online via Zoom. Please RSVP to email yan.wang@westernsydney.edu.au by 5:00pm Wednesday, 21 April, noting if you will be attending in person or via zoom.
Value: Thinking in Common Panel
PanelPresenters: Professor Gay Hawkins, Professor Brett Neilson and Dr Geir Henning Presterudstuen
Chair: Dr. Malini Sur
ABSTRACT:
From Australia’s circular economy and Hong Kong’s dense data networks to Fiji’s urban wastelands, the historical relationship between waste and value continues to shape contemporary debates in the social sciences and the humanities. Today, the study of waste is situated at the crossroads of politics and ecology, entrepreneurialism and dispossession, global data infrastructures and distributive politics. This panel proposes to interrogate the relationship between waste, valuation, border-making, and labour across the scale of global economies, geographical specificities, and local cultures.
Waste, Value and the Circular Economy
Professor Gay Hawkins
The current national and international frenzy for the circular economy (CE) is predicated on a range of mantras. One of the most popular is ‘waste is opportunity’. At the heart of this slogan is the assumption that waste doesn’t represent the end of value but a staging point in the actualisation of new measures and uses. The benefit of this mantra is that it disrupts any sense of value as fixed or intrinsic and foregrounds acts of valuation as central to provoking new realities for discarded stuff. This paper looks at what kinds of valuations for waste are most favoured in CE policy and practice and which ones are marginalised. What kinds of ‘opportunities’ does waste represent and how do political and ecological acts of valuation interact with those driven purely by economics and entrepreneurialism?
Data, Waste and Value at Tseung Kwan O
Professor Brett Neilson
Tseung Kwan O in Hong Kong’s South East New Territories hosts one of the largest commercial data centre clusters in the world. Located on reclaimed land close to undersea cable landings and linked to digital infrastructures that support financial trading on the opposite shores of Hong Kong Island, the site is a crucial gateway and switch-point between the mainland Chinese and global data environments. Tseung Kwan O is also the site of one of Hong Kong’s main waste landfills. Close to capacity and under pressure from population density, land prices and recent limitations on mainland China’s waste import, the landfill abuts the data centre cluster. This complex of spatial and infrastructural relations creates a series of borders that both crisscross the area and extend beyond it. Tracing this proliferation of borders at Tseung Kwan O offers a means to reconsider relations among data, waste and value.
The Social Production of Value of Fiji's Squatter Settlements.
Dr Geir Henning Presterudstuen
In this paper I trace the human economy of informal urban settlements in Fiji. Drawing upon ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in the peri-urban wastelands outside Fiji's largest commercial centres my discussion analyses the everyday economic strategies squatters employ in order to make a living and survive on the fringe of the market economy. I am particularly interested in how local understandings of key theoretical concepts such as value, labour and commodification at once inform and are articulated through various forms of informal economic activities - from commodity trade, gambling and cash crops to usury, hawking and hustling - in the heterogeneous, rapidly changing, and unstable context of squatter settlements. More broadly I am interested in using this particular study to reimagine what economic theories about urban dispossession, urban poverty and everyday politics of distribution might look like from the starting point of the margins in the global south.
BIOGRAPHY
Gay Hawkins is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. She is currently working on two ARC funded Discovery projects with ICS colleagues: Assembling and Governing Habits and Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy. She is the author of The Ethics of Waste (Rowman & Littlefield 2006) and numerous papers on plastics waste and disposability or the rapid transition from useful to useless.
Brett Neilson is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He is currently conducting two ARC Discovery projects with ICS colleagues: Data Centres and the Governance of Labour and Territory and The Geopolitics of Automation. With Sandro Mezzadra, he is author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke 2013) and The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke 2019).
Geir Henning Presterudstuen is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Western Sydney University. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Fiji since 2009 and has a particular interest in how social categories such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and class are constructed in context of the modern market economy. He is the author of Performing Masculinity: Body, Self and Identity in Modern Fiji (Routledge 2020) and co-editor of several edited volumes, including Anthropologies of Value: Cultures of Accumulation Across the Global North and South (Pluto Press 2014).