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SUMMARY:Plastik: Dense objects\, racialised worlds\, and black holes - Lyd
 ia Gibson (Georgetown) 
DTSTART:20250318T130000Z
DTEND:20250318T140000Z
UID:TALK227389@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Tom Fry
DESCRIPTION:In the final days of 2018\, the Jamaican government enacted a 
 ban on single-use plastic bags\, Styrofoam\, and plastic cups. Over the fo
 llowing months\, the black single-use plastic bag – known locally as the
  “scandal bag”\, after the scandals it was so effectively designed and
  deployed to conceal – disappeared from supermarkets\, roadsides\, eater
 ies\, waterways\, and Jamaican life. It also made a slow but remarkable di
 sappearance from the ritual practices of a traditional community deep in a
  montane tropical rainforest – practices that help to maintain tradition
 al ecological knowledge and centuries of forest culture. This talk explore
 s the role of single-use plastic bags in rural\, traditional\, agrarian\, 
 and forest communities\, far outside the capitalist urban- and wastescapes
  to which they are often discursively confined. Analytically unmoored from
  the (social\, technical\, political\, corporeal) death of single-use plas
 tic\, this talk examines the vitality and sociotechnical life of the plast
 ic bag and the myriad uses and value that are denied by the classification
  of single use. Finally\, this talk considers how a conceptual (for it is 
 not a material) category such as single-use plastic is made and functions\
 , how environmental actors are made dense by racialisation\, Othering\, an
 d abjection\, and how these incredibly dense bodies organise our cosmos. 
LOCATION:Department of Geography\, Small Lecture Theatre
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