School of Social and Political Science

Description

Taking its cues from ongoing joint empirical work on the leaky realities of waste management, the talk develops the contours of a ‘containerology’, interrogating containment as a spatio-temporal technology that makes waste manageable and shapes human and more-than-human relations. While containers are devices of ordering that hold together, preserve against dispersal, prevent spillage, and suspend fluctuation, containment cannot but remain contextual, provisional, and leaky at best. As a function of territory and temporality, leakage is the occasion when the established order is disrupted. Nevertheless, the talk also problematises any rigid opposition and incommensurability between containment and leakage, insisting on their co-constitution. Ultimately, it outlines an affirmative, positive take on containment, in contrast to prevailing negative conceptions and practices. Besides referring to exclusion, confinement, and restraint, containment also needs to be understood as an art of inclusion, through the intimate and affective encounters it may offer.