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
2019–present
Full professor, Memorial University
2006–2019
Associate professor, Memorial University
Education
2005
University of Kentucky, PhD - Geography
Publications
2020
Planet of fixers? Mapping the middle grounds of independent and do‐it‐yourself information and communication technology maintenance and repair., GEO: Geography & Environment
2019
Cooking with Controversies: how geographers might use controversy mapping as a research tool., The Professional Geographer
2018
Reassembling Rubbish: worlding electronic waste, MIT Press
2015
Are We Living in a Post-Basel World?, Area
2014
The Changing Geography of Global Trade in Electronic Discards: time to rethink the e-waste problem, The Geographical Journal
2014
Composing Urban Orders from Rubbish Electronics: Cityness and the Site Multiple, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
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