Jeremy Chow is Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University, USA. Chow is the author of The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century (2023) and the editor of three anthologies: Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (2023), Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Eighteenth Century (2025) with Shelby Johnson, and the Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading (2025) with Declan Kavanagh.Sage Gerson is Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies Program Coordinator at Rhode Island School of Design, USA. Her research has been published in Social Text, Media+Environment, Lateral, UCHRI’s Foundry, and as part of The Black Scholar’s Social Justice Handbook series.

• Foreword: Anchoring Waste As/Is by Myra HirdIntroduction: On Waste Worlding by Sage Gerson and Jeremy ChowSection 1: WASTE INFRASTRUCTURES Chapter 1: BIOFILM Microbial Glitch and the Media of the Foul by Lisa HanChapter 2: DEBRIS On Dirt, Infrastructural Risk, and the Aesthetics of Catastrophe by Amelyn NgChapter 3: SINKS Kitchens, Landfills, and Tundras by Amaru Tejeda Section 2: WASTE AS MEMORY Chapter 4: ARCHIVE Reading Waste in the Planetary Record by Jennifer M. GutmanChapter 5: ISRAF Waste in the Pre-colonial Sahara by Erragab EljanhaouiChapter 6: MATERIAL WITNESS Waste, Documentary Testimony, and Contemporary Eco-Art by Ben Ogrodnik Chapter 7: WRECKAGE Spectacular Transmotion Along Southeast American Shores by Sara A. RichSection 3: REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE Chapter 8: FASHION African Consumption of and Alternatives to Textile Waste by Adwoa Owusuaa BobieChapter 9: JUGAAD Resistance through Waste and Innovation by Urvi SharmaChapter 10: SECONDHAND EXTRACTION Media Afterlives and the Material Politics of E-Waste in China by Tinghao ZhouChapter 11: THRIFT Reading the Social Life of Waste by Minu Susan Koshy Chapter 12: WASTEWATER Environmental Engineering meets Queer Theory by Austin WadleSection 4: WASTED LIVES Chapter 13: BIOHAZARD The Queer Stigma and Pride of HIV Positivity by Jeremy ChowChapter 14: NUCLEARISM “Irradiated-Bodies-as-Waste” and Legacies of Transnational Radioactive Residues by Kyoko MatsunagaChapter 15: SURVIVAL Trans Embodiment Beyond Waste at the End of the World by Alexa FoorChapter 16: VOID Mother, Otherworld, Liberatory Unbeing by Zoe Goldstein Chapter 17: WASTEOCENE Mount Everest, Socio-Ecological Toxicity, and John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air by Valerio Angeletti Section 5: ENVIRONMENTAL IN/JUSTICEChapter 18: AGENCY Re-Imagining Waste Disposal, Environmental (In)Justice, and Entanglement in Contemporary Speculative Fiction by Nan SongChapter 19: ENERGY Wastelands, Sacrifice Zones, and Environmental Justice by Sage GersonChapter 20: FECAL SIEGE Living with the Industrial Ecologies of North Carolina’s Pig Farms by Stephanie EcclesChapter 21: FORAGE Waste, Law, and Queer Ecologies from English Commons to Palestinian Hillsides and Cornish Mine Tailings by M.A. MillerChapter 22: PLASTICITY Thinking with Plasticfuturisms by Ela Przybylo

Waste collects in our oceans, archives, and through the structural violence of colonialism and capitalism. This vital collection gathers these threads into a powerful narrative, proving that discard is not an end point, but the force defining our global future.

Jeremy Chow is Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University, USA. Chow is the author of The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century (2023) and the editor of three anthologies: Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (2023), Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Eighteenth Century (2025) with Shelby Johnson, and the Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading (2025) with Declan Kavanagh.Sage Gerson is Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies Program Coordinator at Rhode Island School of Design, USA. Her research has been published in Social Text, Media+Environment, Lateral, UCHRI’s Foundry, and as part of The Black Scholar’s Social Justice Handbook series.

• Foreword: Anchoring Waste As/Is by Myra HirdIntroduction: On Waste Worlding by Sage Gerson and Jeremy ChowSection 1: WASTE INFRASTRUCTURES Chapter 1: BIOFILM Microbial Glitch and the Media of the Foul by Lisa HanChapter 2: DEBRIS On Dirt, Infrastructural Risk, and the Aesthetics of Catastrophe by Amelyn NgChapter 3: SINKS Kitchens, Landfills, and Tundras by Amaru Tejeda Section 2: WASTE AS MEMORY Chapter 4: ARCHIVE Reading Waste in the Planetary Record by Jennifer M. GutmanChapter 5: ISRAF Waste in the Pre-colonial Sahara by Erragab EljanhaouiChapter 6: MATERIAL WITNESS Waste, Documentary Testimony, and Contemporary Eco-Art by Ben Ogrodnik Chapter 7: WRECKAGE Spectacular Transmotion Along Southeast American Shores by Sara A. RichSection 3: REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE Chapter 8: FASHION African Consumption of and Alternatives to Textile Waste by Adwoa Owusuaa BobieChapter 9: JUGAAD Resistance through Waste and Innovation by Urvi SharmaChapter 10: SECONDHAND EXTRACTION Media Afterlives and the Material Politics of E-Waste in China by Tinghao ZhouChapter 11: THRIFT Reading the Social Life of Waste by Minu Susan Koshy Chapter 12: WASTEWATER Environmental Engineering meets Queer Theory by Austin WadleSection 4: WASTED LIVES Chapter 13: BIOHAZARD The Queer Stigma and Pride of HIV Positivity by Jeremy ChowChapter 14: NUCLEARISM “Irradiated-Bodies-as-Waste” and Legacies of Transnational Radioactive Residues by Kyoko MatsunagaChapter 15: SURVIVAL Trans Embodiment Beyond Waste at the End of the World by Alexa FoorChapter 16: VOID Mother, Otherworld, Liberatory Unbeing by Zoe Goldstein Chapter 17: WASTEOCENE Mount Everest, Socio-Ecological Toxicity, and John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air by Valerio Angeletti Section 5: ENVIRONMENTAL IN/JUSTICEChapter 18: AGENCY Re-Imagining Waste Disposal, Environmental (In)Justice, and Entanglement in Contemporary Speculative Fiction by Nan SongChapter 19: ENERGY Wastelands, Sacrifice Zones, and Environmental Justice by Sage GersonChapter 20: FECAL SIEGE Living with the Industrial Ecologies of North Carolina’s Pig Farms by Stephanie EcclesChapter 21: FORAGE Waste, Law, and Queer Ecologies from English Commons to Palestinian Hillsides and Cornish Mine Tailings by M.A. MillerChapter 22: PLASTICITY Thinking with Plasticfuturisms by Ela Przybylo

Waste collects in our oceans, archives, and through the structural violence of colonialism and capitalism. This vital collection gathers these threads into a powerful narrative, proving that discard is not an end point, but the force defining our global future.

Jeremy Chow is Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University, USA. Chow is the author of The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century (2023) and the editor of three anthologies: Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (2023), Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Eighteenth Century (2025) with Shelby Johnson, and the Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading (2025) with Declan Kavanagh.Sage Gerson is Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies Program Coordinator at Rhode Island School of Design, USA. Her research has been published in Social Text, Media+Environment, Lateral, UCHRI’s Foundry, and as part of The Black Scholar’s Social Justice Handbook series.

• Foreword: Anchoring Waste As/Is by Myra HirdIntroduction: On Waste Worlding by Sage Gerson and Jeremy ChowSection 1: WASTE INFRASTRUCTURES Chapter 1: BIOFILM Microbial Glitch and the Media of the Foul by Lisa HanChapter 2: DEBRIS On Dirt, Infrastructural Risk, and the Aesthetics of Catastrophe by Amelyn NgChapter 3: SINKS Kitchens, Landfills, and Tundras by Amaru Tejeda Section 2: WASTE AS MEMORY Chapter 4: ARCHIVE Reading Waste in the Planetary Record by Jennifer M. GutmanChapter 5: ISRAF Waste in the Pre-colonial Sahara by Erragab EljanhaouiChapter 6: MATERIAL WITNESS Waste, Documentary Testimony, and Contemporary Eco-Art by Ben Ogrodnik Chapter 7: WRECKAGE Spectacular Transmotion Along Southeast American Shores by Sara A. RichSection 3: REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE Chapter 8: FASHION African Consumption of and Alternatives to Textile Waste by Adwoa Owusuaa BobieChapter 9: JUGAAD Resistance through Waste and Innovation by Urvi SharmaChapter 10: SECONDHAND EXTRACTION Media Afterlives and the Material Politics of E-Waste in China by Tinghao ZhouChapter 11: THRIFT Reading the Social Life of Waste by Minu Susan Koshy Chapter 12: WASTEWATER Environmental Engineering meets Queer Theory by Austin WadleSection 4: WASTED LIVES Chapter 13: BIOHAZARD The Queer Stigma and Pride of HIV Positivity by Jeremy ChowChapter 14: NUCLEARISM “Irradiated-Bodies-as-Waste” and Legacies of Transnational Radioactive Residues by Kyoko MatsunagaChapter 15: SURVIVAL Trans Embodiment Beyond Waste at the End of the World by Alexa FoorChapter 16: VOID Mother, Otherworld, Liberatory Unbeing by Zoe Goldstein Chapter 17: WASTEOCENE Mount Everest, Socio-Ecological Toxicity, and John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air by Valerio Angeletti Section 5: ENVIRONMENTAL IN/JUSTICEChapter 18: AGENCY Re-Imagining Waste Disposal, Environmental (In)Justice, and Entanglement in Contemporary Speculative Fiction by Nan SongChapter 19: ENERGY Wastelands, Sacrifice Zones, and Environmental Justice by Sage GersonChapter 20: FECAL SIEGE Living with the Industrial Ecologies of North Carolina’s Pig Farms by Stephanie EcclesChapter 21: FORAGE Waste, Law, and Queer Ecologies from English Commons to Palestinian Hillsides and Cornish Mine Tailings by M.A. MillerChapter 22: PLASTICITY Thinking with Plasticfuturisms by Ela Przybylo

Waste collects in our oceans, archives, and through the structural violence of colonialism and capitalism. This vital collection gathers these threads into a powerful narrative, proving that discard is not an end point, but the force defining our global future.