Out of Place: Possibility and Pollution at a Transnational Landfill.

Abstract

This dissertation is an exploration of the political, economic, ecological, and semiotic dimensions of waste management in Northern America, more specifically, of waste circulation and landfilling in the Great Lakes area. It is primarily based on research conducted in and around a large landfill in the rural periphery of Detroit – which once accepted all of Toronto’s waste – and the different neighborhoods and livelihoods entangled with it. Examining landfills and the people and places associated with them, it is argued, provides a new way of understanding societies that are dependent upon mass waste disposal. I demonstrate how the prevailing Northern American waste regime creates strange new possibilities for wasted places and people even as it serves as a source of social and material pollution. All of the chapters share in common a focus on landfilling as a waste disposal method that pollutes environments, bodies, livelihoods, towns, and states, while at the same time generating new ecological relations, economic opportunities, and political movements. Some of the people discussed in my dissertation explore new opportunities through employment as a waste worker at the landfill or by scavenging there, while others seek to control or combat the waste site and see it as the product of injustice and neglect. In each case, waste seems to adhere to people and places, making them “dirty” but also inspiring dreams of future wealth, success, and power.