Abstract
Abstract(English) As the opening statement in a curated dialogue on Language and Waste, this paper considers what a sociolinguistics of waste might look like. In the first two parts, I provide some general rationale and academic context for starting to notice waste. By avoiding the dirty places and raw lives of waste, sociolinguists obscure two important relations: first, the social worlds of people who live and work with/in waste; second, the social connection between “us” (as makers of waste) and those left to pick up the pieces. I briefly review the isolated precedents in sociocultural linguistics for attending to waste. In the third and fourth parts, I propose at least two ways sociolinguistics can contribute usefully and distinctively to discard studies. I start by offering two empirical vignettes concerned with the discursive creation and destruction of value. In this vein, and orienting to economic sociology, I argue that scholarship on stancetaking can helpfully pinpoint the processes of (e)valuation and valuation by which things are declared unworthy or “waste‐able.” Against the backdrop of these initial propositions, the dialogue continues with commentaries by Jillian Cavanaugh, Annabelle Mooney, and Joshua Reno who contribute their own ideas about approaching waste from a decidedly (socio)linguistic angle.
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