Fall 2022

Waste Frontiers – CFI Issue 4

Commodity Frontiers Journal, Online

Commodity Frontiers is a biannual open access publication from the network of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative. With thematic focus, each issue of the journal features short articles, conversations with historians, social scientists, and activists about the method and practice of commodity frontier research, announcements of newly published books and articles, and more.

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Editorial Board
Mindi Schneider, Senior Editor

Editors-in-Chief
Sven Beckert, Ulbe Bosma, Mindi Schneider, Eric Vanhaute

Section Editors
Studying Commodity Frontiers - Samuël Coghe, Shaohua Zhan

Teaching Commodity Frontiers - Gayatri A. Menon, Elisabet Rasch

Historians take on the Present - Mamoudou Sy, Simon Jackson, Murari Kumar Jha

Commodity Frontier Political Ecology - Andrew Curley, Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Conflicts, Frictions, and Counternarratives - Katie Sandwell

Creative Frontiers - Maarten Vanden Eynde

Labor Frontiers - Kristina Dietz, Bettina Engels

From the Field - Hanne Cottyn, Sthandiwe Yeni

Publications - Ernst Langthaler, Rafael Marquese

Lexicon - Claudia Bernardi, Hanne Cottyn, Eric Vanhaute

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Commodity Frontiers is the Journal of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative (CFI). Edited by a group of scholars and researchers from various disciplines and organizations in the CFI Network, Commodity Frontiers 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.

Contributors include historians, social scientists, (political) ecologists, artists, and activists who work on global commodity production and circulation, rural societies, labor history, the history of capitalism, social metabolism, and contemporary politics, conflicts, and counternarratives in the countryside.

Commodity Frontiers endeavors to carry out one of the central goals of the CFI: to provide long historical perspectives on problems that are often assumed to be modern, and to link historical and contemporary research to recast our thinking about sustainability, resilience, and crisis.

Commodity Frontiers is a biannual open-access publication housed at commodityfrontiers.com, and distributed through email subscriptions. Its editorial collective is committed to inclusive, anti-racist, anti-sexist, decolonial scholarship and politics.

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.