Critically analysing how waste is currently configured as a 'household' issue, this book illuminates the implications of these framings and how public sociology can engage critical publics to reorient waste as a global socio-ethical issue.

Is it possible for individuals to tackle waste by recycling, reusing and reducing alone? This provocative book critically analyses the widespread assumption that individuals and households have created our global waste crisis. Sociologist and waste expert Myra J. Hird reveals neoliberal capitalism’s fallacy of infinite growth as the real culprit, and demonstrates how industry and local governments work in tandem to deflect our attention away from the real causes of our global waste problem. Hird offers crucial insights into the relations between waste and wider societal issues including ongoing (settler) colonialism, poverty, racism and sexism, and showcases how sociology may provide solutions through a ‘pubic imagination’ of waste.

Cutting across multiple disciplines, this book maps out a new role for the public sociologist in the post-COVID world. It envisions a new kind of public sociology that brings together “the digital” and the “physical” to create public spaces where critical scholarship and active civic engagement can meet in a mutually reinforcing way.

This book takes a measured look at the 'crisis of waste' in modern society and it does so historically, sociologically and critically. It tells stories about past and present ‘crises’ of waste and puts them in their appropriate social and industrial contexts. From Charles Dickens to Don DeLillo, from the internal combustion engine to fish fingers, from kitchen grease to the Tour de France this book digs deep into society’s dust piles and emerges with untold treasures of the imagination.

The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.

Waste is one of the planet’s last great resource frontiers. From furniture made from up-cycled wood to gold extracted from computer circuit boards, artisans and multinational corporations alike are finding ways to profit from waste while diverting materials from overcrowded landfills. Yet beyond these benefits, this “new” resource still poses serious risks to human health and the environment. In this unique book, Kate O’Neill traces the emergence of the global political economy of wastes over the past two decades. She explains how the emergence of waste governance initiatives and mechanisms can help us deal with both the risks and the opportunities associated with the hundreds of millions – possibly billions – of tons of waste we generate each year. Drawing on a range of fascinating case studies to develop her arguments, including China’s role as the primary recipient of recyclable plastics and scrap paper from the Western world, “Zero-Waste” initiatives, the emergence of transnational waste-pickers’ alliances, and alternatives for managing growing volumes of electronic and food wastes, O’Neill shows how waste can be a risk, a resource, and even a livelihood, with implications for governance at local, national, and global levels.

Michael Burawoy has helped to reshape the theory and practice of sociology across the Western world. Public Sociology is his most thoroughgoing attempt to explore what a truly committed, engaged sociology should look like in the twenty-first century. Burawoy looks back on the defining moments of his intellectual journey, exploring his pivotal early experiences as a researcher, such as his fieldwork in a Zambian copper mine and a Chicago factory. He recounts his time as a graduate and professor during the ideological ferment in sociology departments of the 1970s, and explores how his experiences intersected with a changing political and intellectual world up to the present. Recalling Max Weber, Burawoy argues that sociology is much more than just a discipline – it is a vocation, to be practiced everywhere and by everyone.