CFI 4 Waste Frontiers

Commodity Frontiers Initiative explores the history and present of capitalism, contestation, and ecological transformation in the global countryside. Each themed issue includes articles and interviews with experts about studying and teaching commodity frontiers in theory and in practice. The Journal features reflections and reviews on the dynamics of capitalist expansion, social change, and ecological transformation on global as well local scales, in the past and at the present.

This issue situates waste in the present and historical expansion of capitalism. The contributions to the journal ask questions about producing, managing, and theorizing waste. They examine equity issues around who is responsible for making waste, who is most intimately impacted by waste, and who is defined as waste, or as deserving of living among waste. They look at how patterns in the distribution of waste’s benefits and harms reproduce entrenched global and local inequalities. And they invite readers to ask what can be learned about capitalism - and perhaps about themselves - from studying how waste-in-capital is defined, produced, offloaded, recycled, valued, commodified, managed, experienced, countered, and unevenly invisibilized. In short, they open up “waste” as a material and discursive frontier, operating in service of capital accumulation, colonial expansion, and the maintenance of social hierarchies.

Issue #4 features several contributions, including Maarten Vanden Eynde's interview with Eli Carpenter, a Professor in Interdisciplinary Art & Culture at Umeå University in Sweden. They discuss her curatorial research in “The Nuclear Culture” project, the urgency of nuclear visibility, and notions of deep time responsibility and forgetting.

Abstract: The Nuclear Culture project of Ele Carpenter is the overarching title for her curatorial research into art and nuclear culture covering the full material trace of radioactive materials from uranium mining, energy and weapons production, decommissioning and waste. The curatorial process involves working closely with artists and a range of nuclear contexts, carrying out field research, commissioning new artworks, curating exhibitions and hosting roundtable discussions and symposia. The project started in 2011 when Carpenter was invited to talk about how artists might respond to submarine dismantling by the Submarine Dismantling Project Advisory Group (SDP- AG) who were advising the British Ministry of Defence on how to take apart and store their old laid up nuclear submarines, some of which still have their old reactors on board. This article is a conversation between Maarten Vanden Eynde and Ele Carpenter about the urgency of nuclear visibility and deep time responsibility of radioactive waste in a period of increasing insurmountability.