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Plastic Bags: Living With Rubbish.
Dr Gay Hawkins, Media and Communications, UNSW
| [ Go to this paper in the timetable ] |
The aim of this paper is to examine the ethical significance of waste in our everyday lives. Beginning with the famous plastic bag scene from American Beauty it investigates how changing relations to rubbish are also changing relations to self. The enchanted plastic bag from American Beauty invites us to find beauty in something trivial and worthless, something we have been trained to hate. This shift in our affective response to waste reveals the complexity of ethics as relational and visceral and undermines the categorical imperatives of much environmentalism. In seeking to open up another line of thought about the meanings and experience of waste in our lives beyond existing discourses on nature and its demise this paper aims to investigate how a new ethics of waste might be created, one driven less by guilt and mourning and more by an awareness of the art of transience and our own unbecoming.
