Hervé Corvellec

This volume shows that waste, in both how it is produced and how it is construed, can serve as a revelatory lens through which the social world itself may be critically re-examined and assessed. Drawing on related interdisciplinary interests for waste, it presents contributions that address the thematic concerns of materiality, society, economy, and temporality. The aim is to offer an introduction to critical waste-based epistemology. This chapter opens contextually with introductions to discard and waste studies, and to the practice of critique, followed by an introduction to the 16 contributions to the volume. In a series of further reflections, we elicit the key features and demonstrate how these contributors lay a ground for, and trace pathways towards, a critical waste-based epistemology.