PERC is pleased to confirm Professor Gay Hawkins, Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory at the Institute for Culture and Society, a leading interdisciplinary research centre based at Western Sydney University, as a keynote speaker at the upcoming conference The Lives and Afterlives of Plastic. Her research focuses on the interactions between environments, materials and cultures. Prior to joining WSU in 2015 Professor Hawkins was a Professorial Research Fellow and Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, an innovative research centre based in the Arts Faculty. She is internationally recognised for her work on everyday waste practices and the ways in which changing material and economic practices have provoked new habits. In 2005 she published The Ethics of Waste a book that examined the materialities of waste and the ways in which it makes ethical claims on us. This book has had a major influence on the development of ‘Discard Studies’ a vibrant and growing international research field. Since 2008 a key focus of her work has been the rise of plastic as a mundane material and the profound cultural, environmental and political impacts of this material transformation. In 2015 she published, with colleagues Kane Race and Emily Potter, Plastic Water – the social and material life of bottled water (MIT Press), a global analysis of how the rise of the PET bottle has reconfigured water qualities and interfered with the struggle for safe mass supply. She is currently completing a major study into the introduction of plastic food packaging post WWII called The Skin of Commerce.
Much of the activism around plastic focuses on encouraging consumers to Say No to the use of certain items or regulating to ban them. These strategies imply that reducing demand will be politically effective in tackling the massive impacts of plastics waste and pollution. This denies the multiplicity of situations in which consumers have no choice but to accept plastic and the ways in which plastic is infrastructural to so much economic activity. In this presentation, Professor Hawkins argues that it is necessary to shift attention from governing plastic to how we actually came to be governed by it. Using the example of the rise of plastic food packaging in the post WWII period it explores how plastic became mundane, how it was transformed from miracle new material to ordinary and unnoticed, and how it reconfigured food, shopping, waste habits and market arrangements in the process. It is only by understanding this complex transformation of becoming governed by plastic that it is possible to investigate diverse political strategies for managing it in common good.
The Lives and Afterlives of Plastic is a nearly carbon-neutral conference taking place entirely online from the 26th of June to the 14th of July, 2017.
