Yale University doctoral candidate Amy Zhang, under the guidance of Dr. Michael R. Dove, will undertake research on the transformation of social and physical contemporary urban landscapes through the lens of waste management. Waste management has become a focus of official efforts to construct modern cities, a prominent means of livelihood for rural migrants, and a frequent rallying point for urban environmental activists. Building on the emerging literature in anthropology on the material dimensions of social life and urban infrastructure, this study aims to examine the meanings and values that inform different ways of discarding and reclaiming objects
Through eighteen months of ethnographic research with waste experts, activists and informal collectors in Guangzhou and Beijing, China, the researcher will identify the social practices, technologies and infrastructures of waste management, and the accompanying aspirations and values that are reconfiguring China's urban environment. She also seeks to understand the public reception of science and technology in China; various ways of knowing waste, risk, and pollution; and the relationship between state efforts to build modern cities and the lived experiences of inhabitants. The researcher will use a variety of social science research methods including semi-structured interviews, oral histories, participant observation (of waste management schemes), ethnographic life-cycle analysis (of waste objects), photographic documentation, and photovoice.
Public policy debates on waste management in China foreground the need for technological solutions. This project broadens the debate over municipal waste management to include recognition of the public reception of science and technology and informal systems of recycling. These dimensions are important to both policy makers and urban and regional planners who seek to design livable cities in China and the global south. Finally, this project adds an ethnographic perspective, focused on the significance of human aspirations and the unforeseen outcomes of social practice, to a growing interdisciplinary field aimed at enhancing understandings of the human dimensions of urban environmental change. Supporting this research also supports the education of a graduate student.
This research examines the political ecology of waste in Guangzhou — one of China’s largest mega-cities — and how various stakeholders make their claims over the environmental and economic outcomes of the city’s waste management system. The fieldwork draws on three distinct case studies — citizen contention over incineration, the battle over formalised and informal recycling, and new organic waste treatment schemes — to examine how the political stakes of waste are articulated and expressed by homeowner activists, environmental NGOs, informal collectors and scientists. This project builds on the literature in anthropology on the material dimension of social life and urban infrastructures to build an understanding of how different waste practices generate environmental, economic and political value. It also engages with the interdisciplinary debate in geography, environmental studies and urban studies on how complex social-technical systems are made and what they can tell us about the processes of exclusion, class and territory making. This study carries broader implications for policy debates on waste management and the public participation and engagements with urban infrastructure projects in the developing south. This project hopes to contribute to understandings of how waste is emerging as a contentious urban environmental practice. As governments strive to introduce large technological solutions for the complex social issue of waste and pressing environmental challenges, citizens in China demand that they participate in every stage of decision-making and monitoring. There is also an increasingly strong recognition that large scale environmental problems such as waste require multiple avenues of environmental education, legal accountability and social monitoring. Finally, this project has implications on thinking about the place of recycling and material reuse in our resource scarce world and how often marginalised populations, in this case, urban migrants in China, might be at the very heart of new environmental practices of the sorting and disassembly of trash. Rather than seeing urban scavenging as a marginal practice, this project presents the complex and intricate forms of knowledge that are required to direct different waste matter to reuse.
