"Rematerializing" the Digital: Governmentality and the Environmental Consequences of Life Online

This project investigates the ‘end of life’ governance of digital devices as a way of focusing its consideration of the material consequences of digital lives. According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2020, only 17.4% of all global e-waste was recycled in 2019. The fate of the remaining 82.6% is not known, but is believed to have been incinerated, dumped in landfills and oceans or illegally exported to low-and-middle-income countries where it is managed by the informal sector under unsafe conditions. The reality is, we do not know where our digital discards go once we throw them away or how this waste is handled. This begs the question about the governance of e-waste, which has been subject to very little consideration in the critical humanities. In following the work of Lepawsky and Pickren, we are interested in “analysing the particular ways in which e-waste is politicized” (Pickren 2014: 5) and what is bracketed out of such governmental framings of the problem. In pursuing how e-waste is made governable, we aim to render visible the thornier issues of colonial histories and the asymmetries of power and privilege that structure contemporary waste management practices.