SOAS Anthropology Department Seminar - Lydia Gibson

The SOAS Anthropology Department welcomes Dr Lydia Gibson for her talk Plastic Value: a calculus of use, value, power, and order through single-use plastics

Single-use plastics are scourges upon the environment and humanity; glossy, neoliberal insurgencies that choke the life out of marine animals, livestock, waterways, and impoverished communities. They are also, though, a discursive-material apparatus for determining value.

Single-use plastics is not a material type, it is a racialised classificatory system that obscures and collapses notions of use and value by rendering plastic engagements hyper- or invisible. The very term single-use plastics is an eponym of erasure, occluding its multiple uses by many who rely upon these adaptable – if mismanaged – technologies and discursively legitimising or condemning the material forms that these polymer agents take.

The moniker serves, too, as an inadvertent description of racial capitalism: the plastic, mouldable nature of economic relations and the single, undistinguished use of one or another disposable body. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork of forest-based traditions in a remote Maroon community in the Caribbean, where multiple and repeated use of single-use plastics rather than portend cultural destruction enables traditional practices and maintains social networks, this talk explores analytical constructions of value and the semiotic squares, rectilinear logics, and turgid dispositifs that have imprisoned concepts such as value, use, and power.

About the Speaker

Lydia Gibson is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Center for Science and Society, Columbia University, whose research involves forest use, Caribbean ecologies, postcolonial theory, and materialities of environmental actions. Her research also explores how environmental discourse and data practices shape and differentiate access and power in environmental spaces.

She works closely with local Maroon communities in Jamaica to monitor ecosystems and think about exploitation, misuse, and colonisation of traditional and indigenous knowledge. Gibson holds a Bachelors in Maths and Biology from the University of Bristol, and Masters and a PhD from UCL. Before joining Columbia, Gibson was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL.

Please note this is an in person event, but Lydia will be presenting on Zoom. 

We would like to invite attendees to join us at the IoE bar for drinks after the event to continue the conversation.

Conact

If you have any questions, please contact Alice Rudge (ar80@soas.ac.uk).