- Title: Thursday Brown Bag Lecture - Waste and Material Culture: Living with Abandoned Things
- Host Department:
Institute for the Humanities
- Date: 10/13/2004 - 10/13/2004
- Time: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
- Location: Osterman Common Room, 0520 Rackham, 915 E Washington St, Ann Arbor
- Contact Information: Nicola Kiver
734 936 3518
nkiver@umich.edu
- Description: Gay Hawkins, School of Media and Communications, The University of New South Wales, Australia
- Detailed Information: Could the recognition of waste as a set of abandoned things change our relations with it? Could such a recognition lead to new forms of materialism less concerned with the vagaries of desire and disposability? According to Bill Brown, we glimpse thingness in irregularities of exchange or in moments when objects stop working for us. Waste is often found in these settings, on the edges of order, ephemeral and phenomenal; in noticing these irregularities we are allowing waste to capture our attention. And in these chance interruptions and encounters different relations to things and to ourselves might emerge -- in other words, a different ethics. Hawkins will explore such possibilities using Agnes Varda’s documentary “The Gleaners and I.”
