Spectacular Technology, Invisible Harms: Touring Guangzhou’s Waste Facilities

Amy Zhang, Harvard

University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA)

Friday, February 24, 2017 12:00 pm EST

Museum Room 345

This talk examines organized public tours of waste to energy (WTE) incinerators in Guangzhou, China against the backdrop of mounting public concerns about the toxicity of the urban environment.  Visits to WTE incinerators invite urban residents to evaluate the safety of burning waste. Through ethnographies of waste facility tours, I examine moments of tension and debate around the dematerialization of waste, where messy material effluence is transformed into invisible toxins that ultimately accrue in bodies. Increasingly undetectable to the senses, the evidence of pollution and harm from waste treatment facilities are knowable only through figures and statistics. I argue that visitors hesitate to subscribe to the capacity of instruments to alert them to the dangers of burning waste. Instead, they rely on their own body’s ability to sense harm.