The Conversation

Josh Lepawsky

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Associate Professor of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland

I research the geographies of discards as well as those of maintenance and repair. Today's discards are synthetic, heterogeneous, and entail high degrees of indeterminacy around their mitigation or remediation. Maintenance and repair, although essential to the smooth functioning of socioeconomic life, have until quite recently, been relegated to the margins of social science research.

Questions that inform my research include where and how are contemporary discards made? Where do they travel and where do their effects accumulate? Who gets what discards, where, how, and under what conditions? I am also interested in how maintenance and repair, broadly conceived, might offer both literal and figurative lessons for figuring out how to live well together in permanently polluted and always breaking worlds.

Experience

  • 2006–present
    Associate professor, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Education

  • 2005 
    University of Kentucky, PhD - Geography

Publications

  • 2018
    Reassembling Rubbish: worlding electronic waste, MIT Press
  • 2015
    Are We Living in a Post-Basel World?, Area
  • 2014
    Composing Urban Orders from Rubbish Electronics: Cityness and the Site Multiple, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
  • 2014
    The Changing Geography of Global Trade in Electronic Discards: time to rethink the e-waste problem, The Geographical Journal
  • 2012
    Legal geographies of e-waste legislation in Canada and the US: Jurisdiction, responsibility and the taboo of production, Geoforum
  • 2011
    Making Chains that (Un)make Things: waste-value relations and the Bangladeshi rubbish electronics industry, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography
  • 2010
    Mapping the international trade and traffic of electronic waste., The Canadian Geographer

Grants and Contracts

  • 2018
    Where is Repair?
    Role:
    Principal Investigator
    Funding Source:
    Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
  • 2012
    Reassembling Rubbish
    Role:
    Principal Investigator
    Funding Source:
    Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Professional Memberships

  • Canadian Association of Geographers
  • Association of American Geographers
  • Society for Social Studies of Science

Research Areas

  • Human Geography (1604)
  • Social And Cultural Geography (160403)
  • Economic Geography (160401)