Abstract
As a pervasive, material element of the global, plastics raise potent social and environmental questions. More than merely the “stuff” of potential global prosperity, plastics are substances that people inscribe with varied cultural meanings. Deploying four conceptual “entry points” for global research, we explore how global plastics have become not only a site of an emergent socioecological crisis but themselves a point of leverage for a more humanized globalization. We approach the problem first as an exercise in reframing, shifting our viewpoint away from debates on waste to re-examine ideas of culture and symbolism. Then, working through the entry points of the particular, materiality and affect, we ground our argument in examples from the contemporary pandemic response, earlier ethnographic work, and our own ethnographic projects. We show how plastics have failed people’s desires for a durable modernity, but nonetheless come to shape the ways they feel and think about themselves and each other as sharing responsibility for a global world.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to our research respondents and B arts in Stoke-on-Trent, UK and to Dr. Jonathan Larson, Prof. Zsuzsa Gille and Dr. Maddy Thompson for comments on the text.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Un-Framing and Re-Framing the Global: An Introduction
- Contesting Hyperglobal Framings: An Analytical Approach
- Grasping Terroir while Teaching Online: Resituating the “Field” in Pedagogies of the Global
- Oriental Sensitivity: Towards a Poetics of Global Studies
- On Global Plasticity: Framing the Global Through Affective Materiality
- Art and Global South: “Playing Venice” at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB)
- Framing the Material Global: The Grounded Politics of HIV Testing Scale-Up
- Review Essay
- William Rankin: After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century
- Book Reviews
- Walter Mattli: Darkness by Design: The Hidden Power in Global Capital Markets
- Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla: Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668
- Hassan Malik: Bankers & Bolsheviks: International Finance & The Russian Revolution
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Un-Framing and Re-Framing the Global: An Introduction
- Contesting Hyperglobal Framings: An Analytical Approach
- Grasping Terroir while Teaching Online: Resituating the “Field” in Pedagogies of the Global
- Oriental Sensitivity: Towards a Poetics of Global Studies
- On Global Plasticity: Framing the Global Through Affective Materiality
- Art and Global South: “Playing Venice” at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB)
- Framing the Material Global: The Grounded Politics of HIV Testing Scale-Up
- Review Essay
- William Rankin: After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century
- Book Reviews
- Walter Mattli: Darkness by Design: The Hidden Power in Global Capital Markets
- Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla: Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668
- Hassan Malik: Bankers & Bolsheviks: International Finance & The Russian Revolution