Slow Disasters in the Wasteocene: An Entangling History of Knowledge, Substances and Activism

Since September 2024, the project has been supported by the BUWStart (Foris) program with a twelve-month funding period.

Principal Investigator: Jun-Prof’in Dr. Cécile Stehrenberger
Research Associate: Katharina Andrea Kalthoff 

Short Description:

The project Slow Disasters in the Wasteocene takes on an entangling perspective on the impacts of waste – such as (toxic) pollution caused by chemical accidents and by landfills - exploring the dynamics between rapid on-set and slow disasters (Stehrenberger 2020). Drawing on concepts like "transcorporeal toxicity" (Alaimo 2010) and "slow violence" (Nixon 2011), the project examines how (toxic) waste residues affect different regions, to varying degree and over different spans of time. It investigates the material and activist networks warning about these disasters, analysing the mobilization of data and histories by affected communities. The project also explores how terms such as "sacrifice zone" and "environmental racism" have been used to address inequalities in disaster contexts, highlighting the resistance practices of local activists and their efforts to challenge state and corporate disinformation. By studying these dynamics, the project raises critical questions around disaster justice and the responsibilities of various actors in and for the age of waste, or Wasteocene (2021) in Marco Armiero’s sense.

Activities

Workshop I: Wasteocene: Disaster Narratives & Knowledge Practices | Abstracts

Workshop II: Erzählen und Erinnern im Wasteocene: Überreste, (End-)Zeitlichkeiten, Unzuverlässigkeit. 

Project Description

According to historian Marco Armiero, a central aspect of human existence in the twenty-first century – in the ‘Wasteocene’ (Armiero 2021) – is the social process behind waste and of wasting. The residues of what is discarded, including uncontrollable substances from radionuclides to microplastics, enter the tissues of both human and non-human organisms, resulting in what Stacy Alaimo has called ‘transcorporeal toxicity’ (2010), therefore connecting bodies and creating material-semiotic assemblages. These assemblages are characterised by deep inequalities: everyone is affected, but in very different ways and in varying degrees of severity. The Wasteocene encompasses the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) of wasting but is also characterised by practices that aim at radical socio-economic, socio-ecological and political change. The project shares the commitment to developing forms of thinking the catastrophic anthropogenic transformations of the planet in ways that can be called “sentipensante” (Fals-Borda 1981; Galeano 1982), as in transcending the bifurcation of the epistemic and the affective, inherited by colonialism.

The project Slow Disasters in the Wasteocene, which operates at the interface between Discard Studies and Critical Disaster Studies, investigates and establishes links between various catastrophic events that have occurred since 1958, e.g. in Leverkusen (Germany), Ancash (Peru), the state of Jalisco (Mexico), various areas of Costa Rica, Guatemala and Nicaragua, and the province of Santa Cruz (Argentina). The accumulations studied include both eventful (‘rapid on-set’) disasters such as fires in landfills or chemical accidents, and ‘slow disasters’ such as the pollution and contamination of water and soil by landfills. In various cases, disasters characterised by events have prompted a discussion of the more insidious slow disasters and different disaster temporalities (Usón & Stehrenberger 2025).

We are interested in the connections between the cases at the level of materials, forms of resistance and activism, and practices of generating and mobilising data and narratives. How, for example, could residues of the same type of pesticide, which were brought to the island of Annobón in Equatorial Guinea as ‘toxic waste’ from ‘Europe’, end up in the Rhine in 2021 after an explosion at the Chempark Leverkusen (Ferl et al. 2023), and which also have been used in the Mexican state of Jalisco since the 2000s, where environmental activists blame them for water pollution. The project also traces the polyurethane foam that originated in Germany and was used to build emergency shelters after the earthquakes in Ancash in 1970 and Managua in 1972, and which has been simultaneously filtered out of the waters of Central America as ‘plastic waste’ since the 1990s.

On the level of activism, the project examines how concepts such as ‘sacrifice zones’, ‘environmental racism’, or ‘waste colonialism’, highlighting relations of power and inequality, have (or have not) been transferred between different geographical contexts, but also between academic and non-academic contexts. At the same time, the project is interested in the (strategic-narrative) practices activists have used not only to challenge and sue state and corporate disinformation but have also been lamenting ‘undone science’ (Hess 2016): the failure to produce scientific evidence on the causes and consequences of disasters. The analysis focuses on how residents of affected areas have therefore collected data themselves and produced counter-expertise in collaboration with scientists, to then be disseminated by professional journalists and other media creators through various channels and mobilised in court proceedings.

In addition, the project investigates how state and corporate actors, particularly in ‘crisis communication’ operations, countered this counterexpertise with new (counter)counterexpertise and how the toxicity of substances was (re)negotiated in these dynamics and how this raises questions of ‘disaster justice’: asking for the responsibilities of various actors in and for the Wasteocene.

References

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily natures: science, environment and the material self. Bloomington [u.a.]: Indiana University Press.

Armiero, Marco. 2021. Wasteocene. Stories from the Global Dump. Cambridge University Press.

Fals Borda, Orlando. 2009. Una sociología sentipensante para América Latina. Edited by Víctor Manuel Moncayo. Bogotá, D.C.: Siglo del Hombre Editores; CLACSO.

Ferl, Lucas, Frank Fiedrich, Tim Lukas, Cécile Stehrenberger, and Bo Tackenberg. 2023. “Doing Trust and Crisis Communication. Narratives of the 2021 Explosion in the Chempark Leverkusen.” DIEGESIS 12 (1): 1. https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/view/460.

Galeano, Eduardo. 1982. Memoria del fuego. I. Los nacimentos. Siglo Veintiuno Editores.

Hess, David J. 2016. Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions. MIT Press.

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.

Stehrenberger, C. S. (2020). Annobón 1988: Slow disaster, colonialism, and the Franco dictatorship. Art in Translation, 12(2), 263–287.

Usón, Tomás and Cécile Stehrenberger. 2025. “Disasters as Time, Time as Disaster.” A Time of Disastrous Anticipations: Essays on Life in the Shadow of Catastrophe, edited by Reidar Staupe and Monika Gabriela Bartoszewicz. Routledge.