W A S T E S C A P E S
Elizabeth (Liz) Miller
WasteScapes is an educational media project in the form of a locative app, an interdisciplinary course series, and hosted tours throughout the city of Montreal. The project began as a summer course in 2020. My colleague MJ Thompson and I had proposed a week-long cycling course in response to an open call at Concordia University to use interdisciplinary pedagogy to solve a “wicked problem.” We pitched waste as the problem and cycling as our method. We began with a set of broad questions including: Where and how does waste live and circulate in our environment? What values and practices shape waste production, management, and reduction? How can we use embodied pedagogies and media to instigate dialogue and problem solving about waste? And what would we learn about the perception of waste from the vantage of a bike?
With environmental justice as a framework, our plan was to explore the scales of waste from individual to institutional, from local to global, and to consider the role of personal and political accountability in addressing the inevitable place of waste in our lives.
We began by annotating a Google map indicating waste-related sites in every part of the city.
We then curated the sites into neighborhood and thematic groupings like waste waters, waste-aesthetics, and waste-values, and these clusters became the blueprint for local tours. COVID forced us to radically re-imagine the course, but the timing for embodied waste pedagogies seemed as relevant as ever. We were all emerging from the first months of online emergency teaching and were eager to step away from our computers and get outside.
After running the first iteration of the course, we shared our sprawling Google map with our friend and colleague Kim Grinfeder, a professor and creative technologist at the University of Miami. Kim had previously designed the Know your Grove Mobile app, an augmented walking tour of one of Miami’s oldest neighborhoods, Coconut Grove. Kim’s app rewards users for “being there.” Once in situ, a participant can “unlock” audio clips, still images and text. Kim generously offered us a chance to “re-skin” his app, an ideal invitation for a project based on waste and repurposing. This meant we would use the same map-based interface and interactive affordances but redesign the look and content.
Developing an app would expand the reach of our project beyond a university course, but it also presented new forms, contradictions, and scales of waste to consider and make transparent on the tour. How might we communicate the impact of electronic waste circuits while simultaneously reinforcing the value of a cell phone for pedagogical purposes?
We wanted to make strange the fact that corporations have no responsibility for the life cycle of products like cell phones or plastic. And we also wanted to make strange our own daily waste patterns and pathways as well as the electronic devices in our pockets.
Student-use inspired us to rework some of the site content, to tweak related course activities, and to figure out what kind of reflexive activities might happen before and after the site visits. For example, in anticipation of our curated tours, we asked students to select a waste site in their neighborhood, visit it several times and create a photo essay. This exercise permitted us to learn from what they were observing and to begin a collective conversation about the forms of waste in our lives. Student feedback also guided us in how to make the tour more accessible.
Most waste-sites were cordoned off with security signs and gates, situated in industrial areas with heavy truck traffic, and did not welcome pedestrians or cyclists. In response to these limitations, we encouraged students to explore the surround of the site. What did they notice about who lived and worked nearby? What were the sounds and movements of other species in the area? What smells did they notice?
Place and places were the primary protagonists in WasteScapes and we relied on archives, observation and site-based encounters with locals, artists and workers to deepen our understanding of each location.
WasteScapes was my first collaborative media project that emerged directly from a teaching experience rather than the reverse process, where I start with a media project and then design a plan to reach students and teachers. The app and the tours presented an opportunity to be in conversation with media practitioners, interdisciplinary waste scholars, and students about what we might learn from the layers of waste history and how we can work together to both represent and manage our future waste dilemmas. Designing the app was an opportunity to explore the potential of augmented place-based pedagogies and to re-discover our city, Tiohtià:ke/Montréal through the lens of waste.
About The Artist
is a documentary maker and professor who uses collaboration and interactivity as a way to connect personal stories to larger social concerns. Her films and multi-platform projects on timely issues such as water privatization, refugee rights, gender and environmental justice have won awards and influenced decision makers. Her work has been broadcast on international television, streamed on Netflix and featured in galleries, climate conferences and at festivals including Hot Docs and SXSX.edu. Her recent projects swampscapes.org, theshorelineproject.org and wastescapes.com are part of her ongoing commitment to foster climate literacy and engaged pedagogy. Liz is a Full Professor in Communications Studies and is the co-director of the Loyola Sustainability Research Center at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the co-author of “Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice (2017) and has partnered with organizations including UNESCO, International Association with Women and Radio and Television, Witness and Wapikoni on new media and advocacy training.
The text above is excerpted from “WasteScapes: Using Locative Media to Augment Waste Pedagogies in Place” by Elizabeth (Liz) Miller. To read the full essay, pick up a copy of Spectator vol. 42, no. 2 (Fall 2022).
All images by Lisa Graves, © Concordia University
”Wastescapes” audio copyright Philip Meyer, 2022
Web design by Taylor Crawford
By working along pre-existing pathways, the aim of the app and the group tour was to point to the layers of histories, land-uses, and struggles. But we needed to balance attention between the affordances of the screen and a quieter practice of sensory observation by smelling, observing, and listening. [...] Multi-sensory noticing is particularly important in landscapes where sites, smells and sounds can point to levels of toxicity but also to signs of remediation.
An ongoing objective of the project was to cultivate care and connection to place. How might careful observation foster connection to the land and to past, present, and future waste processes? The landscapes and even access to the sites would present challenges on a regular basis and this had to become part of the method of WasteScapes—the ability to observe and respond to the inevitable variabilities in our local landscapes.
