Anthropology
College of Liberal Arts
Twin Cities
Award Year
2020
University Award
McKnight Land-Grant Professorship
No Monument Location
Plastic Futures: Transnational Engagements with Waste, Recycling, and Toxicity in the Americas
Plastic – the quintessential modern material – has come to symbolize the destructive dimensions of human innovation. As an opening to social and environmental problems, plastic has inspired valuable research across the sciences, arts, and humanities. This interdisciplinary project based in Haiti examines how marginalized people’s mundane engagements with plastic complicate or challenge the ideas of scientists, analysts, and other environmental experts, offering a greater understanding of global environmental inequalities and creative solutions to contending with toxicity.