Our Approach

The interdisciplinary Electronic Life Histories Project integrates behavioral archaeology, feminist political ecology, and science and technology studies to employ a life history model, community-based research and creative engagement to address the making of electronic waste. Focused in the Greater Lafayette area of Indiana, which is home to a major university and significant industrial manufacturing, this project examines the entanglements among people, electronics and waste-making. Considering an object’s life history as the procurement of raw materials, manufacture, use, reuse, recycle, discard, and deposition, we argue that in the context of e-waste, a life history approach, bolstered by an engagement with frameworks that illuminate sociotechnical fields of power, provides a much-needed interdisciplinary perspective. Specifically, drawing upon results from survey responses, ethnographic data and a material culture classroom project, this project focuses on a significant interstitial stage between reuse and discard.

Life Cycle Assessment

•Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), as defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), “addresses the environmental aspects and potential environmental impacts (e.g. use of resources and the environmental consequences of releases) throughout a product’s life cycle from raw material acquisition through production, use, end-of-life treatment, recycling, and final disposal”

•LCA has become the most widely used methodology for examining environmental sustainability and has been used to study: product design, process improvement, and decision making.

•As environmental policy world-wide becomes increasingly life cycle based, LCA has become crucial in policy making.

Behavioral Archaeology

•Behavioral Archaeology defines ‘archaeology’ as the study of the interaction between people and things in all times and places and thus, makes no distinction between past and present as far as the study of technology and technological change.

•An object’s life history includes the procurement of raw materials, manufacture, use, reuse, recycle, discard, and deposition.

•A behavioral chain is a “fine-grained” life history, a detailed account of the interactions and activities in the course of an object’s life.

•Each link in an artifact’s behavioral chain is an activity or interaction where people, artifacts, and environmental factors interact at specific points throughout the life of an object.

Feminist Political Ecology

•Asymmetrical power landscapes that populate political, economic, and environmental scales, scales which connect local groups to global markets, policy.

•Many different stakeholders and perspectives associated with an environmental issue, identify different decision-making pathways associated with the problem, and expose the power relations involved.

•The negative environmental and health effects of e-waste are separated geographically from the main centers of electronics consumption, and the discard of e-waste is often hidden in the waste stream.

Creative Engagement and Arts-based Strategies

•Creative engagement transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries to further public knowledge and participation through arts-based and public humanities practices.  

•Drawing inspiration from social practice art, conceptual design, and oral history, our model challenges hierarchical boundaries between artists and viewers, producers and consumers, experts and amateurs in order to include tacit knowledge and promote pluralist discussion.

•Arts-based strategies such as exhibitions, installations, and workshops provide opportunities to engage multiple publics in conventional and unconventional venues.