Publications

Although a wide body of scholarly research recognizes multiple kinds of values for water, water security assessments typically employ just some of them. In the present article, we integrate value scenarios into a planetary water security model to incorporate multiple water-related social values and illustrate trade-offs among them. Specifically, we incorporate cultural values for environmental flows needed to sustain ecosystem function (rights of waters), the water requirements of a human right to food (rights to water), and the economic value of water to commercial enterprise (commercial water rights). Pairing quantitative hydrological modeling with qualitative systems of valuing, we suggest how to depict the available water for realizing various combinations of the values underlying those rights. We account for population growth and dietary choices associated with different socioeconomic pathways. This pluralist approach incorporates multiple kinds of values into a water security framework, to better recognize and work with diversity in cultural valuation of water.

What makes trash trash? How do we decide what to throw away? Driven by these questions and others, Samuel Amago takes us through the streets and alleys of Spain, sorting through recycling bins, libraries, social media, bookstores, and message boards in search of things that have been forgotten, jettisoned, forsaken. Ranging in topic from the transformation of urban space during the transition to democracy to a twenty-first-century sanitation strike that paralyzed Madrid for weeks, from the films of Pedro Almodóvar to graphic novels about Spain’s housing crisis, Basura presents an alternative story of contemporary Spanish culture through the lens of wasted things.

Not merely an environmental problem, the proliferation of trash is an indicator of the social, political, and economic processes that undergird late, neoliberal capitalism. In chapters on cinema, photography, archaeology, drawing, comics, literature, ecology, and urban design, Amago places waste objects into dialogue with the cultural practices and structures of power that have produced them. Drawing from archaeological, ecocritical, and new materialist approaches, Amago argues that discards possess agency and generate an array of effects. Just as trash never fully disappears but returns to haunt its creators, so history never vanishes despite being buried or ignored by official narratives. Basura considers the efforts of artists, writers, and designers for whom waste is a means to withstand cultural erasure.

How are global relations and planetary flows experienced, interpreted, and managed from places set aside from everyday use, as “sacred” in that sense? Sanctuary Lab, a transdisciplinary initiative at UVA, investigates how religious processes interact with planetary stresses. Provisionally adopting a keyword in religious studies, the sacred, opens a post-disciplinary angle of inquiry into Anthropocene processes of cultural and environmental change. Focusing on dynamics of change in places regarded as sanctuaries affords unique perspective on how rapid planetary changes interact with particular inherited streams of normativity and imagination. This essay integrates field note illustrations from Yellowstone and Bhutan with critical reflection on the lab’s approach in order to share initial hypotheses, collaborative research practices, and potential significance. It suggests that sacralization is part of the process through which cultures make sense of rapid changes; that nonhumans participate in sacralization; that sanctuaries offer unique laboratories of coupled change; and that arts-based exercises can help drive critical reflection on experience and method.