March 1: Public Practice Event with Samantha MacBride
Discards and Material Practice: Individual and Systemic Perspectives on Wastes in Worlds of Arts, Crafts, and Design.In collaboration with RISD faculty members Andrea Johnson (Landscape Architecture) and Laura Briggs (Architecture), Center for Complexity welcomes Samantha MacBride for a lecture and conversation about waste in creative practice, titled Discards and Material Practice: Individual and Systemic Perspectives on Wastes in Worlds of Arts, Crafts, and Design.
Date: Wednesday, 1 March 2023
Time: 6:30 pm EST
Location: 20 Washington Place, Lobby Gathering Space
Drawing from perspectives in engineering, critical social science, and public administration, MacBride will present some conceptual tools for visual artists, designers, and craftspersons to think about wasted materials arising from their creative practices. Beginning with a review of circuits of biogenic and synthetic organics, toxicants, and inert substances, she will invite attendees to consider how action at various scales does, or does not, “make a difference” in addressing social-ecosystemic crises of our day.
Samantha MacBride, Ph.D. (she/her/hers, white Scots-Irish settler) teaches Urban Environmentalism at the Marxe School of International and Public Affairs, Baruch College, CUNY, and has worked for over two decades in fields of solid waste management and wastewater treatment. Samantha’s interests center on measurement and characterization methods, biological materials flows, plastics pollution reduction, regionalization of recycling economies, and waste colonialism. Samantha has also recently begun research on the contemporary UFO phenomenon in the United States, and its relation to questions of ecology and discards. Samantha lives part time in southern Rhode Island. She is the author of Recycling Reconsidered (MIT Press, 2012).