ecoArt China Speaker Series: Joshua Goldstein

Remains of the Everyday traces the changing material culture and industrial ecology of China through the lens of recycling, placing the sustainability and plastic pollution crises of our present day into historical and global context. On the one hand, the Chinese state has repeatedly promoted acts of voluntary recycling as exemplary of conscientious citizenship. On the other, China's informal recycling networks—such as the collectors of plastic and cardboard in Beijing’s neighborhoods today--have been represented as undisciplined, polluting, and technologically primitive though in fact they have been the engine of a highly complex globalized recycling system reaching into household trashbins across North America. Dr. Goldstein’s talk will address the human and environmental impact and intrinsic liminality of recycling as an economic process and the role of these marginalized migrant workers who have been at the center of the global scrap trade in the 21st century.

Goldstein is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California, and a contributor to the ecoArt China catalogue project.

About the Speaker Series