Critical Circularity – (re)configuring repair and reuse.
Join us in the STS Seminar Room (Universitätsstraße 7/Stiege II/6. Stock (NIG) 1010 Vienna)
Abstract
Inasmuch as the circular economy has become a prominent topic within political and corporate discussions worldwide – imagining a wholescale transformation of linear modes of production and the creative recovery and repurposing of materials formerly classified as waste – a range of recent critical assessments have identified key faultlines in this discourse. These critiques have characterised the circular economy as a “refurbished version of market-oriented capitalism”(Genovese and Pansera 2021), and identified tendencies toward technocratic policy interventions such as “consumer nudging, quality assurance standards, and enhanced waste policies” (Niskanen and Mclaren 2023). Responding to these critiques in this paper we develop a notion of critical circularity, drawing on two overlapping projects focused on the configuration of projects of repair and reuse. Our first case is drawn from the fields of wastewater and sewage treatment. Emerging in the nineteenth century, through the consolidation of public health, sanitation and environmental science – together with what Schneider (2011) characterises as the technologies of industrial ecosystems in recent years sewage infrastructures have years emerged as sites of renewed political concern. In this context, visions of the circular reuse and anticipated monetisation of sewage have been troubled by a recognition of the ways in which wastewater is commonly contaminated by a range of toxic substances (including PFAS, microplastics and heavy metals). Basing our analysis in current research exploring the potential reuse of the solid waste produced through sewage treatment – commonly referred to as sludge or biosolids – we explore the ways in which anticipated transitions in sewage treatment entail situated negotiations of the mass and volume of solid waste, together with the ways in which biosolids are entangled with more-than-human and chemosocial relations, in the context of changing climatic dynamics. Our second case draws on an ongoing engagement with projects of repair and activism around the global ‘right to repair’ movement. In this case we explore how the objectives of a movement for a right to repair configure repair practices in ways that simultaneously preserve and subvert existing socio-material orders.
We conclude by pointing to the prospects for critical and engaged conceptions of the circular economy. My coauthors for this work at Patrik Bonney (Deakin University) and Kevin Witzenberger (Queensland Universiyt of Technology).
Biography
Matthew is Professor of Environment and Society and Deputy Head of School (Research), School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW. His most recent books include the co-edited volumes Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics (with Jason Chilvers, Routledge, 2016) & Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory (with Juan Francisco Salazar, Céline Granjou, Anna Krzywoszynska & Manuel Tironi, Bloomsbury, 2020). Matthew is an editor of Science, Technology and Human Values (Sage), an associate editor for Science as Culture (Taylor & Francis).
