Animal waste work. The case of urban sewage management in Sweden
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8094612 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tora Holmberg (0000-0003-0845-1116, Uppsala University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 14-28 |
| Publication date | 2019-06-21 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Contemporary Social Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2158-2041 • E-ISSN: 2158-205X |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/21582041.2019.1630669 |
| OpenAlex | W2949513859 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 31 |
Urban infrastructures such as wastewater services are essential to the functioning of cities. Through waste work, sewage gets transformed and revalued. Non-humans are potentially unruly agents in the transformation of “dirty” sewage into biogas, a “clean” energy resource in environmental terms. But these values are not given or applied in any simple sense. What goes on under the surface, beneath the street or inside a pile of dirt is the invaluable work that constitutes a city’s multispecies waste management. The article argues that rats, worms and microbes perform labour in the urban wastewater economy, as they eat, digest and breed. This article investigates the role of these non-human waste workers and the cultural and economic values they produce in the intersections between the socio-technical infrastructures where the urban and the animal meet. The article makes use of “trash-tracing” as a method and follows the multiple steps taken in the chain of sewage management in the city of Gävle, Sweden. It contributes new knowledge on the waste ecologies of cities by paying close attention to shifting and paradoxical valuations of wastewater, as it is configured through nonhuman work
Business · Dirt · Environmental planning · Garbage · Geography · Sewage · Waste management · Wastewater · Work (physics · Engineering · Food Waste Reduction and Sustainability · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Water Governance and Infrastructure
Rats and Sewers
A defense of waste
The invisible city
Discarding well? justice and collective care in two grassroots waste initiatives in the UK
Decay as a mode of biogas production
The more-than-living city
Industrializing Bacterial Work
The (in)visibility of sewage management and problematization as strategy for public awareness
Rats claiming rights? More-than-human acts of denizenship in Amsterdam
We are Part of Nature
Disrupted Cities
The Life of Cheese
The cultural biography of things
Ontology of Trash, An
The Work of the Dead
Valuation as Evaluating and Valorizing
Bacterial cultures
Assemblage and critical urbanism
Rethinking urban metabolism
Urban Animals—Domestic, Stray, and Wild
Mapping international flows of electronic waste
Knowing Waste
Trash Animals
The perils and promises of microbial abundance
Flesh and stone
Circulations and metabolisms
Actor Networks, Modes of Production, and Waste Regimes
Shifting modes of governing municipal waste - A sociology of translation approach
Compost Politics
The Mushroom at the End of the World
How Pigeons Became Rats
Harmless, friendly and lethal
| Unique citing works | 10 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,5 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |