Speaker:  Amy Zhang, New York University

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. Starting in the early 2000s, Chinese policymakers came to see waste management as an object of environmental governance central to the creation of “modern” cities. China’s cities started experiments with the circular economy, in which technology and new policy could convert all forms of waste back into resources. Based on long-term research in Guangzhou, this talk details the implementation of technologies and infrastructures to modernize a mega-city’s waste management system. Waste’s transformation revealed uncomfortable truths about China’s mode of environmental governance: a preference for technology over labor, the aestheticization of order, and the expropriation of value in service of an ecological vision. Waste’s afterlives exhibited a propensity to draw together diverse matters and objects. The talk shows how in disputes and practices around waste, diverse waste matter in transformation created temporary and emergent social and ecological interdependencies and gave rise to new political sentiments and actions across diverse urban dwellers. 

Amy Zhang is a sociocultural anthropologist and political ecologist whose research investigates environment, technology, labor, and urban life. Her first book Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China (Stanford University Press, 2024) explores how waste infrastructures, materials and their technical interventions ground and condition the forms, possibilities and limits of China’s emerging urban environmental politics. Other writings appear in Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Science, Technology and Human Values, China Perspectives, e-flux Architecture, LIMN, Made in China and Can Science and Technology save China? among others. She is assistant professor of Anthropology at New York University.

Zoom Meeting Link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97147498753