Beritahu teman:

The Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Kanada, mencari kandidat S2 dan S3 yang tertarik di bidang Perdagangan dan Lalu-lintas Limbah Elektronik Internasional (International Trade and Traffic of E-Waste). Kesempatan ini terbuka bagi mahasiswa tingkat akhir (untuk tingkat S2) maupun bagi mereka yang telah menyelesaikan studinya (untuk tingkat S3) dengan latar belakang budaya, ekonomi, politik atau studi Asia.

Dr. Josh Lepawsky in the Department of Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland is seeking graduate students (MA or PhD) interested in studying the international trade and traffic of e-waste from a variety of different perspectives. These studentships are funded through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Environmental Issues Research Grant.

Ideal applicants will be recent or current undergraduates (for MA positions) or graduates (for PhD positions) with some background in cultural, economic, or political geography (or cognate disciplines), and/or Asian Studies. The ability to conduct fieldwork in Asian contexts, including but not limited to China, India, and Singapore, would be especially advantageous.

Eligibility

The studentships are conditional on successful admission to the graduate program. Applicants need not secure, or apply for, admission prior to application for these studentships. Annual renewal of the studentships are subject to satisfactory progress towards graduate degree completion. International applications are welcome.

The Department of Geography at Memorial University offers attractive funding packages for graduate students, and there are numerous internal and external scholarship and fellowship opportunities for competitive applicants.

Potential applicants are encouraged to contact me directly by e-mail (jlepawsky [at] mun.ca) for further information about the studentships. Applicants should include in their message answers to the following questions:

1. Why are you interested in e-waste as a research topic?

2. What sort of research questions do you have in mind?

3. How do you anticipate answering them?

4. What do you see yourself bringing to the broader research project that might enrich it?

Please include a curriculum vitae or a brief description of your program of study.

Details about applying to graduate studies at Memorial University can be found at:

http://www.mun.ca/become/graduate/

Josh Lepawsky
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography
Phone: +;1 709 737 3098
Fax: +;1 709 737 3119
Skype: lepawsky

Memorial University
Department of Geography
300 Prince Philip Drive
St. John’s, NL
Canada
A1B 3X9

http://www.mun.ca/geog/people/faculty/jlepawsky.php

http://www.mun.ca/geog/research/digital_ develop.php

Research

Mapping the International Trade and Traffic of Electronic Waste
Researcher: Dr. Josh Lepawsky

Our technologizing world is one fraught with radical social, political, and economic unevenness. Digital technologies and the industries that produce them are often represented as desirable economic development strategies. Yet, there is a growing recognition that these high-tech products and industries exact significant environmental and social costs that belie optimistic predictions about the emergence of a de-materialized and sustainable ‘Information Age’.

In 2006, Canadians disposed of 140,000 metric tonnes of obsolete electronic equipment or ‘e-waste’. The United Nations estimates that anywhere between 20 and 50 million tonnes of e-waste is generated globally; and according to activist groups, 50 to 80 percent of the e-waste designated for recycling domestically in Canada is actually being exported overseas to be processed by poor and marginalized populations in ‘developing’ Asian and African countries.

No single definition of e-waste exists, but in Canada the emerging targets of legislation include personal computers (PCs), laptop computers, monitors, peripherals (e.g., printers, scanners, disk drives), telephones, mobile phones, and facsimile machines. The dominant approach to e-waste in this legislative milieu is to conceptualize it as a problem to be mitigated through technical engineering and regulation. Typically, the disposal of e-waste is understood as an endpoint within a linear process of production and consumption that culminates in land-filling or incineration. However, there is an important body of research – notably anthropology, geography, history, and sociology – that understands disposal and waste quite differently. Rather than an endpoint in a narrowly defined economic process, disposal is understood to be part of complex cultural practices of social constitution, ritual, and reproduction that have not only changed over time in our own society, but also vary geographically in culturally distinctive ways.

Dr. Lepawsky’s research interests in the geographies of the international trade and traffic of electronic waste are organized around the following kinds of questions:

• How much and what kind of e-waste is exported from Canada and where does it go?

• How are the licit and illicit trade networks for e-waste formed and organized?

• Where, by whom, and under what conditions is e-waste processed domestically and abroad after it is exported from Canada?

• How do the domestic and international divisions of labour involved in e-waste processing contribute to the capture and/or creation of value from waste?

• How do the emerging patterns of e-waste legislation strategically use and represent the geographies of ‘waste’ and ‘value’? What are the implications of those representations for policy and practice?

• How do materials designated as ‘e-waste’ in one place become sources of ‘value’ elsewhere?

An emerging hypothesis of the research is that the geographies of ‘e-waste’ constitute spaces of moral ordering that socially constitute ‘waste’ and ‘value’ as ontological characteristics of digital technologies through geographic difference and mobility.