Josh Lepawsky

I research the geographies of discards as well as those of maintenance and repair. Today's discards are synthetic, heterogeneous, and entail high degrees of indeterminacy around their mitigation or remediation. Maintenance and repair, although essential to the smooth functioning of socioeconomic life, have until quite recently, been relegated to the margins of social science research.

Questions that inform my research include where and how are contemporary discards made? Where do they travel and where do their effects accumulate? Who gets what discards, where, how, and under what conditions? I am also interested in how maintenance and repair, broadly conceived, might offer both literal and figurative lessons for figuring out how to live well together in permanently polluted and always breaking worlds.