Browsing by Subject "hyperobjects"

Electronic waste (e-waste), an end-of-life-cycle waste stream of used and disposed of electronic products, where a growing number of electronics are becoming part of our interactions with technology and nature. In this paper I discuss that previous literature on e-waste is lacking in an examination of e-waste itself, and current political theories such as North-South Divide theory and World-systems theory are lacking in regard to the overlapping environmental and socio-economic dimensions that China currently exhibits. The majority of e-waste ends up in the global South, including in places such as Guiyu, China. Once considered to be the worst e-waste site in the world, the town now receives an increasing amount of e-waste from within China due to the country’s growing middle class. This thesis is largely a theoretical investigation in to our understandings of waste and objects such as e-waste, and how this reflects on such things as our understanding of objects, nature and politics. I will explore questions surrounding e-waste from a post-humanist approach, such as New materialism, Actor-network theory and Object-oriented ontology (OOO). My main theoretical focus is with OOO, a recently emergent ontological realist approach. And this is grounded within the context of the Anthropocene, considered to be a geological epoch that we all now live in that was initiated by human activity instead of naturally occurring processes (Crutzen 2000). This thesis will be testing the OOO theory, and the extent to which a new ontology can relate to the material and political. To analyze e-waste in the context of OOO, I use Morton’s (2013) concept of the hyperobject to explore further any insights drawn from our relations with objects in the Anthropocene and our relation with waste. This analysis explains how the hyperobject allows for objects such as e-waste to become political in the Anthropocene. Furthermore, an analysis of e-waste as a hyperobject demonstrates that we (humans and non-humans) can be political; that we can be active agents as well as responsible actors in the interactions that we share