Consumerism, Cheap Nature, and State Socialism: A Transnational Waste Regime Perspective

Zsuzsa Gille (Illinois)

Beginning:

Thursday, 20 January 2022 16:15

On Thursday, 20 January 2022 the Graduate School and the Leibniz ScienceCampus invite to a colloquium lecture by Zsuszsa Gille entitled "Consumerism, Cheap Nature, and State Socialism: A Transnational Waste Regime Perspective".

Abstract:

The goal of this lecture is to reevaluate state socialism’s environmental record from a transnational rather than a comparative perspective. Arguing that state socialist modernity had its own view of nature and materials, as well as a largely misunderstood ethical stance to consumption that is ignored in today’s studies of Capitalocene examining the interrelations of capitalism and climate crisis. The presentation will provide an overview of the environmental advantages and disadvantages of central planning with an eye to demonstrating how Cold-War-era trans-bloc relations and a unique socialist economic logic mutually constituted each other. Instead of returning to the rightfully criticized Anthropocene term, she will argue for a more central role for waste and materiality in our understanding of the current dilemmas around global environmental problems.

Zsuzsa Gille:

Zsuzsa Gille is Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published on issues of qualitative methodology as it relates to globalization and new concepts of space, on environmental politics and on the sociology of food. Her research interests are environmental sociology, Eastern Europe, European Union, global and transnational sociology, sociology of consumption, food, knowledge, materiality, waste, contemporary social theory and ethnography.

Cooperation:

Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World

Via ZOOM (ID: 614 4762 1903)