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Bringing in the Garbage: Opening a Critical Space for Vehicle Disposal Practices

This dissertation examines the relationship among practices and policies of waste/ing and economic structures to make visible the implications of vehicle disposal policies for environmental policy and theory. Consequently, I attempt to build upon the small body of literature that is now critically engaging with waste production and resulting actions/inaction in the form of policies of management. In doing this I use waste as a lens to examine the interrelationships among environmental degradation and economic and political structures. Further, I examine these phenomena in relation to a physical object, the automobile, to add materiality to abstract notions of waste as it relates to both the political and the economic. Through vehicle recycling policies, I analyze how underlying economic structures in contemporary capitalism result in specific responses to the "problems" of waste as well as how the related responses, or "solutions" perpetuate an un-ecological industrial system which severely restricts the possibilities of making substantial change in the production of environmental harms. / Ph. D.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/77046
Date30 May 2012
CreatorsSurak, Sarah Marie
ContributorsPublic and International Affairs, Luke, Timothy W., LaBerge, Ann F., Hull, Robert Bruce IV, Fell, Richard D.
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation, Text
Formatapplication/pdf, application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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