JEP » Issues » Waste and Globalised Inequalities » Matter in and out of Place: A Story About Wastefulness, Hybridity, and Flows of Plastic (Photo Essay)

Matter in and out of Place: A Story About Wastefulness, Hybridity, and Flows of Plastic (Photo Essay)

Autor*innen: Eitel, Kathrin
https://doi.org/10.20446/JEP-2414-3197-35-2-167
Volume XXXV • Issue 2/3 • 2019
Pages 166-196
Keywords: Photo-Essay

Abstract

Plastics are in our oceans, creating garbage islands, contaminating seawater, and are a serious threat to the world’s environment. Therefore, plastic and its debris are highly visible in scientific and societal discourses and common knowledge. Looking from a different perspective of waste and its debris, especially in its relation to question of what is (from) human and what not, we may, from a phenomenological perspective, examine different angles of the visibility and non-visibility of plastic. The unwanted, or the dirt, which is called a ‘matter out of place’, according to Mary Douglas, is omnipresent. But if dirt is out of place for one person, couldn’t it conversely then be in place for someone else? The following photo-essay aims to answer this question while focusing on the visibility and invisibility of material waste in its environment. Concretely, it allows an insight into the ecology of waste.

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