The Canadian Waste to Resource Conference (CWRC) is proud to announce that Robin Nagle, anthropologist-in-residence for New York City’s Department of Sanitation and author of Picking Up, a book about what it takes to manage the municipal waste of the continent’s largest metropolis, will speak at this year’s event, held on October 25-26 at the Scotiabank Convention Centre in Niagara Falls, ON.
Nagle, who served New York as a uniformed sanitation worker, and is also the critical professor of anthropology and environmental studies at New York University, will address attendees on Day 1 of the two-day CWRC.
“We are extremely pleased to have such a distinguished group of speakers at this year’s event,” said Michele Goulding, Conference Manager and the Ontario Waste Management Association’s Director of Finance and Member Services. “Robin’s expertise and experiences within our industry will certainly resonate with everyone attending the CWRC.”
Nagle’s most recent book, Picking Up, is an ethnography of New York City’s Department of Sanitation, based on a decade of work with the Department, which included time on the job as a uniformed sanitation worker.
As a clinical professor of anthropology and environmental studies in New York University’s School of Liberal Studies, Nagle’s research fits within the new interdisciplinary field of discard studies.
“I consider the category of material culture known generically as waste, with a specific emphasis on the infrastructures and organizational demands that municipal garbage imposes on urban areas,” said Nagle on her website. “Within this broad perspective, I’m especially interested in the people, history, and politics that are always inherent to labors of waste, and in the many ways that the form of waste we call garbage is implicated in every contemporary environmental crisis.
“I also consider mechanisms of evaluation that determine how and when a particular example of material culture is defined as “trash” and the varied consequences, in many contexts, of such a definition.
For more on Robin Nagle, visit: www.robinnagle.com
For more on this year’s CWRC Program, including the extensive list of accomplished speakers slated to attend the event, visit www.cw2rc.ca/cpages/program