Joshua Goldstein (USC)

Joshua Goldstein of USC presents his new book looking at the history of the recycling industry in China. “Remains of the Everyday” traces the changing material culture and industrial ecology of China through the lens of recycling.

Over the last century, waste recovery and secondhand goods markets have been integral to Beijing’s economic functioning and cultural identity, and acts of recycling have figured centrally in the ideological imagination of modernity and citizenship.

The result, Goldstein argues, is the repeatedly re-inscribed exclusion of waste workers from formations of modern urban citizenship as well as the intrinsic liminality of recycling itself as an economic process.