World market for waste and the technologies of human misery.

• Grant number: 13/19790-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: February 01, 2014
• End date: January 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Political Theory
• Principal Investigator: Edson Passetti
• Grantee: Ricardo Abussafy de Souza
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Sociais. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 08/58852-4 - Ecopolitics: planetary governmentality, new institutionalizations and resistances in the society of control, AP.TEM

Abstract

In its most contemporary expression, the waste undergoes a process of positivation, at the moment it combines practical and discursive resources guided by standards of environmental sustainability. Elevated to the level of environmental commodity, the waste enter another record of governmentality, no longer operated by the social-medical discourse that focused it as a source of disease and miasma, but aligns itself to the concept of natural resources and therefore develops intelligibilities from the developmental precepts. From these principles and in the context of global agreements over an intergovernmental planetary management, the questionaments about residues are modulated through the urgency if the contemporary. The urgency of the current environmental problems culminates, inevitably, in the prescription of new modes of conduct that make this a research object, its field of analysis on the verge of new social relations in contemporary. The methodology has its guiding principle in the research about the provenance (Herkunft) of human conduct in relation to modes of waste management in modern cities. This precept, the study of the provenance, draws on the discussions held by Michel Foucault on this genealogical strategy as a research methodology. The materials to be analyzed refer to different discursive formats, which can be laws, procedures and techniques of waste management, social projects, environmental education programs, among others that reach effectively into this theme. It is intended, then, to analyze as a research hypothesis the forms of problematization about the management processes of the remains of the cities (sometimes known as waste, or as residues, recyclable materials, rejects, etc.) and its alliance with the forms of the population govern, therefore, the human conduct.