Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-07(E), Section: A.

Advisers: Helen F. Siu; Michael R. Dove.

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This dissertation is an ethnographically grounded examination of efforts to govern and to produce value from waste materials against the backdrop of broader attempts to create modern sustainable cities in post-reform China. I argue that a wide range of efforts to transform waste matter characterize an urban sustainable approach to waste management. Through various practices, such as ecological modernization by the state and local citizen-led projects, different types of waste matter are separated and subjected to new technologies, chemical alterations, and intimate bodily knowledge. These attempts to transform waste matter reveal how modern urban sustainability relies on the simultaneous generation of value and management of pollution. I focus on the affective nature of these engagements and foreground the material qualities of waste matter.

Second, this dissertation uses the materiality of waste to examine emerging urban social relations in China. Contention over waste tells us both about how citizens engage with the state and how different social subjects and differentiations are emerging through waste politics. The material qualities of waste matter mediate how local actors and communities contest and navigate state schemes and how they develop a set of strategies and maneuvers to achieve their own political ends. I also show how particular qualities of waste matter are recalcitrant or belie efforts to contain or to segregate it from urban life.

Human ecology > Study and teaching.