Waste Geographies: Politics, People, and Infrastructures
Examines waste as a political object and its spatial distribution using geographic perspectives, focusing on infrastructure, labor, and environmental justice.
Summary
What you’ll be able to do
Define waste as a political object and contrast this definition to popular, technical, and/or managerial definitions.
Apply new social-science definitions of infrastructure to waste geographies.
Appraise their own role(s) in various waste geographies and describe waste’s ubiquity.
Explain the factors that produce uneven waste geographies, including the roles class, gender, and race play in personal and professional proximity to and distance from wastes of all kinds.
Make connections between, on the one hand, how problems having to do with waste are defined and, on the other hand, proposed solutions to ‘the waste problem’.
Apply the lessons garnered from waste geographies to their research and disciplinary specialties.
Synthesize major course concepts to frame novel and innovative research questions about waste geographies.
Communicate complex conceptual arguments clearly and relate them to case studies.
Explain the social, economic, and/or environmental dimensions of the sustainability challenge(s) of waste and waste management.
Describe the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of recycling and other waste reduction/management strategies and identify potential trade-offs and interrelationships among these dimensions at a level appropriate to the course.
Source: UW Guide
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Prerequisites
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- Junior standing
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- Junior standing
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Spring 2027No instructors recorded for this selection.
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Student experience
the class
Explores waste as discarded material, a polluting and threatening substance that must be managed, and as a political object. Waste's distribution across space and among groups of people, as well as the reasons for the effects of that distribution, will be examined using geographic perspectives. Who has the ability to avoid or remove themselves from waste? Who must live and work with it? The concept of infrastructure as a set of material things (roads, trucks, boats); laws and regulations; labor relations; and economies of disposal and consumption determining waste flows unites disparate topics and case studies across the semester. Concepts of and social movements for environmental justice are recurring themes.
difficulty & workload
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Topics
- Infrastructure, labor relations, and economies of disposal/consumption.
- Environmental justice and social movements.
- Social stratification and access to waste avoidance.
Skills
- Applying social-science definitions of infrastructure to analyze waste systems.
- Explaining how class, gender, and race shape spatial proximity to waste.
- Connecting waste problem definitions to proposed solutions.
- Framing novel research questions using waste geography concepts.
Grades
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Explore recorded gradesRecorded 2026-10-14
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Model & dataset provenance
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