Polly Bodgener

About Polly’s Research:

Waste is often treated as “out of sight, out of mind”. Although various avant-garde movements have celebrated the subversive potential of waste, waste work remains comparatively invisible. My project provides an overdue analysis of the representation of waste work in a selection of twentieth and twenty-first century novels, comics, poems, and artworks. The vital performance of waste work across sites such as homes, cities, and landfills demonstrates that waste does not vanish when it is discarded: it remains connected to people and places. By investigating how twentieth and twenty-first century writers and artists have attempted to remediate the invisibility of waste work, my research will reveal our continuing relationship to waste and the wider ecological consequences of disposability culture on the spaces we live in and dump in.