It's such a waste. Crimes and controversies of festival tents
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6015481 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lene Granzau Juel-Jacobsen (0009-0002-7885-3356, Danish School of Media and Journalism, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-10-31 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Material Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/13591835251389546 |
| OpenAlex | W7102707130 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 44 |
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork – including participant observations, interviews, archival research, and netnography – this article traces the material and symbolic trajectories of festival tents. It explores how waste-making intersect with comfort, pleasure, and sociality, but also with postcolonial entanglements and global inequalities. Focusing on micro-moments of ‘wasteification’, the study examines how tents shift from valued sites of intimacy and identity to ambiguous, discarded matter. This transformation reveals competing and messy logics: some tents are abandoned due to material fatigue, planned obsolescence, or cultural scripts of disposability, while others are salvaged, cherished, and recommodified. By attending to the ontological multiplicity of festival tents, the article contributes to debates on disposability, waste infrastructures, and the politics of material culture. As ephemeral yet materially persistent objects, festival tents illuminate uneven global circuits of production, consumption, and abandonment, emerging as evocative actors in broader discussions on waste, inequality, and material ethics
Ephemeral key · Ethnography · Identity (music · Materiality (auditing · Netnography · Participant observation · Politics · Scripting language · Food Waste Reduction and Sustainability · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Municipal Solid Waste Management
Purity and Danger
Wasteocene
Economies of Recycling
Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure
The Social Life of Things
Ethnography in/of the World System
Urgent abatement of industrial sources of nitrous oxide
Waste Away
From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History
Reassembling the Social
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
A review and meta-analysis of country-of-origin research
Glastonbury
The ‘Global South’ in the study of world politics
Trade politics at the checkout lane
Crap on the map, or postcolonial waste
Materiality and Waste
The Body Multiple
The Mushroom at the End of the World
Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together
Redefining pollution and action
Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
Imperial Debris
Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |