Recycling Economies: Global Transformations of Materials, Values and Social Relations

Catherine Alexander is a professor of anthropology at Durham University. Most of her work is concerned with shifting configurations of state, market, society and the third sector. This has also informed her work on waste. She has published on the community waste and recycling sector in Britain and waste as material and metaphor in Kazakhstan. Her current research is on attempts to revitalize Kazakhstan's nuclear energy industry, reusing expertise and equipment left over from the Cold War. Joshua Reno is an assistant professor of anthropology at Binghamton University and is primarily interested in the intersections between environmental issues and science and technology. He conducted his doctoral fieldwork on transnational waste circulation and mega-landfills, their transformation of landscapes, lives and communities in rural Michigan, and their relationship to environmental politics and neoliberalism. From 2008 to 2010 he studied emerging European technologies in the fields of health and the environment, their innovation, contestation and governance. He has written articles on waste, energy, communication and material culture.