Performing Waste: To Re-Member Pasts and Fabulate Futures

Performing Waste offers groundbreaking insights into the vibrant interdisciplinary field of waste studies through the lens of performance and artistic practice.

This pioneering collection examines how waste and wasting are performed across diverse media and genres, from Afrofuturist musical works to contemporary scrap art installations. Distinguished international scholars present original research using situated methodologies, including ethnographic approaches, to analyse compelling case studies that span global contexts. The volume explores eco-trauma and toxic kinship in artistic works, investigates the relationship between extractivism and knowledge production, and examines critical sites like the Polish-Belorussian border and e-waste processing in Ghana and Peru. By reframing familiar environmental narratives and introducing novel perspectives on waste agency, materiality, and performance, the collection challenges conventional understandings of our discarded materials and practices. Each contribution illuminates how waste performance can help us reimagine ecological relationships and envision alternative futures beyond extractivist paradigms.

This volume is an essential reading for students and scholars in environmental humanities, posthumanist theory, decolonial studies, eco-arts, media studies, and performance studies, as well as anyone concerned with creative responses to our global waste crisis.