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"Home Signs grew out of anthropologist Joshua Reno's experience of caring for and trying to communicate with his teenage son, Charlie, who cannot speak. In order to manage interactions with others, Charlie uses what are known as "home signs": gestures developed to meet his need for expression, ranging from the wiggle of a finger to a subtle sideways glance. Though he is non-verbal, he is far from silent; in fact, he is in constant communication with others. In this intimate reflection on language, disability, and togetherness, the author invites us into his and Charlie's shared world. Combining portraits of their family life and interviews with other caregivers, Reno upends several assumptions, especially the idea that people who seem to not be able to speak for themselves need others to speak on their behalf. With its broad exploration of non-verbal communication in both human and non-human contexts, Home Signs challenges us to think harder about what it means to lead a "normal" life and to connect with another person"--

"Though we are the most wasteful people in the history of the world, very few of us know what becomes of our waste. In Waste Away, Joshua O. Reno reveals how North Americans have been shaped by their preferred means of disposal: sanitary landfill. Based on the author's fieldwork as a common laborer at a large, transnational landfill on the outskirts of Detroit, the book argues that waste management helps our possessions and dwellings to last by removing the transient materials they shed and sending them elsewhere. Ethnography conducted with waste workers shows how they conceal and contain other people's wastes, all while negotiating the filth of their occupation, holding on to middle-class aspirations, and occasionally scavenging worthwhile stuff from the trash. Waste Away also traces the circumstances that led one community to host two landfills and made Michigan a leading importer of foreign waste. Focusing on local activists opposed to the transnational waste trade with Canada, the book's ethnography analyzes their attempts to politicize the removal of waste out of sight that many take for granted. Documenting these different ways of relating to the management of North American rubbish, Waste Away demonstrates how the landfills we create remake us in turn, often behind our backs and beneath our notice"--Provided by publisher

AbstractIn conditions of post‐welfare, failure takes a variety of forms. I offer an auto‐ethnographic account of state‐funded caregiving for people diagnosed with intellectual and developmental disabilities in New York State, where both caregiver labour and its management have been subjected to greater discipline as post‐welfare initiatives seek to re‐educate recipients of benefits and careworkers to be simultaneously more autonomous from and more accountable to the state. Placing these changes within the specific history of failed disability care in the United States, I explain how new disciplinary devices for reporting further alienate caregiver labour and complicate welfare management in practice.

Discard studies have demonstrated that waste is more than just a symptom of an all-too-human demand for meaning or a merely technical problem for sanitary engineers and public health officials. The afterlife of waste materials and processes of waste management reveal the centrality of transient and discarded things for questions of materiality and ontology and marginal and polluting labor and environmental justice movements, as well as for critiques of the exploitation and deferred promises of modernity and imperial formations. There is yet more waste will tell us, especially as more studies continue to document the many ways that our wastes are not only our problem, but become entangled with the lives of nonhuman creatures and the future of the planet we share.

ABSTRACT This article compares different communicative trials for apes in captivity and children with autism in order to investigate how ideological assumptions about linguistic agency and impairment are constructed and challenged in practice. To the extent that Euro‐American techniques of "unnatural" language instruction developed during the Cold War era have been successful, it is because communicative interactions are broken down into basic components, and would‐be language learners are equipped with materials, devices, and habits that make up for their distinct bio/social deficits. Such linguistic equipment can present a challenge to the ideological presumption of a subject inherently gifted with the rudiments of talk, that is, the human as naturally speaking. However, this ideology can reassert itself if the active contribution of unnatural language learners to their technoscientific trials is downplayed. In order to counter this tendency, I propose that speech acts be reimagined as part of a more encompassing semiotic ensemble. [language development, semiotics, materiality, posthumanism, linguistic ideology]

This article explores the technoenvironmental politics associated with government-sponsored climate change mitigation. It focuses on England's New Technologies Demonstrator Programme, established to test the "viability" of "green" waste treatments by awarding state aid to eight experimental projects that promise to divert municipal waste from landfill and greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The article examines how these demonstrator sites are arranged and represented to produce noncontroversial and publicly accessible forms of evidence and experience and, ultimately, to inform environmental policy and planning decisions throughout the country. As in experimental science, this process requires that some bear witness to the demonstrators, but in a disciplined way. Whether through the extrapolation of facts about technical performance by affiliated third-party consultants, or the orchestration of visitor centers open to the general public, making the demonstrators public involves controlling the ways in which they are interpreted and perceived. However, the unstable publicity of waste management facilities proliferates unofficial accounts as well. These acts of counterwitnessing, as I refer to them, not only potentially dispute the official evidence collected from the demonstrators, they also can pose a challenge to the understanding of technology upon which such government initiatives are based.

This paper offers a counterpoint to the prevailing account of waste in the human sciences. This account identifies waste, firstly, as the anomalous product of arbitrary social categorizations, or 'matter out of place', and, secondly, as a distinctly human way of leaving behind and interpreting traces, or a mirror of culture. Together, these positions reflect a more or less constructivist and anthropocentric approach. Most commonly, waste is placed within a framework that privileges considerations of meaning over materiality and the threat of death over the perpetuity of life processes. For an alternative I turn to bio-semiotics and cross-species scholarship around the question of the animal. Specifically, the paper asks what theories of waste would look like if instead of taking 'dirt' as their starting point, they began with trans-species encounters with animal scat. Following bio-semiotics and efforts to deconstruct the animal/human binary, it is suggested that the objectual forms commonly referred to as 'waste' are not arbitrarily classified but purposefully expended, and thus symptomatic of life's spatio-temporal continuation. Waste matter, therefore, is best construed not as anthropocentric but as semi-biotic: a sign of the form of life to which it once belonged. This alternative perspective has implications for how approaches to industrial forms of mass waste can be reconceived.

An overdue examination of the Midwest's long influence on nationalism and white supremacy. Though many associate racism with the regional legacy of the South, it is the Midwest that has upheld some of the nation's most deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness. From Jefferson's noble farmer to The Wizard of Oz, imagining the Midwest has quietly gone hand-in-hand with imagining whiteness as desirable and virtuous. Since at least the U.S. Civil War, the imagined Midwest has served as a screen or canvas, projecting and absorbing tropes and values of virtuous whiteness and its opposite, white deplorability, with national and global significance. Imagining the Heartland provides a poignant and timely answer to how and why the Midwest has played this role in the American imagination. In Imagining the Heartland, anthropologists Britt Halvorson and Josh Reno argue that there is an unexamined affinity between whiteness, Midwestness, and Americanness, anchored in their shared ordinary and homogenized qualities. These seemingly unremarkable qualities of the Midwest take work; they do not happen by default. Instead, creating successful representations of ordinary Midwestness, in both positive and negative senses, has required cultural expression through media ranging from Henry Ford's assembly line to Grant Wood's famous "American Gothic." Far from being just another region among others, the Midwest is a political and affective logic in racial projects of global white supremacy. Neglecting the Midwest means neglecting the production of white supremacist imaginings at their most banal and at their most influential, their most locally situated and their most globally dispersed.

Introduction -- The Midwest and white virtue -- Heartland histories -- Inside out : the global production of insular whiteness -- No place like home : the "ordinary" Midwest through popular fiction and fantasy -- Theater of whitness : mass media discourses on the Midwest region -- Conclusion -- Appendix A : bibliography of films referenced in chapter 4 -- Appendix B : bibliography of media articles referenced in chapter 5.

Shoddy rags and relief blankets : perceptions of textile recycling in north India / Lucy Norris -- Death, the phoenix, and Pandora : transforming things and values in Bangladesh / Mike Crang ... (et al.) -- One cycle to bind them all? : geographies of nuclearity in the uranium fuel cycle / Romain Garcier -- The shadow of the global network : e-waste flows to China / Xin Tong and Jici Wang -- Devaluing the dirty work : gendered trash work in participatory Dakar / Rosalind Fredericks -- Stitching curtains, grinding plastic : social and material transformation in Buenos Aires / Karen Ann Faulk -- Trash ties : urban politics, economic crisis and Rio de Janerio's garbage dump / Kathleen M. Millar -- Sympathy and its boundaries : necropolitics, labour and waste on the Hooghly river / Laura Bear -- 'No junk for Jesus' : redemptive economies and value conversions in Lutheran medical aid / Britt Halvorson -- Evident excess : material deposits and narcotics surveillance in the USA / Joshua Reno -- Remont : work in progress / Catherine Alexander.