Abstract

This panel emerges out of the Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy Project based at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University in collaboration with colleagues from UTS and Monash. The workshop has three aims:

• to explore the frenzy for diagramming economies in the current push for a circular economy;

• to examine how waste is accounted for and visualised in these drawings;

• to play with drawing as a speculative method.

Everywhere you look economic relationships are being drawn and redrawn: circles, butterflies, networks, flow charts, all privilege recursivity and reincorporation where waste is eliminated or automatically returned to new uses. These diagrams seem to have a more performative than representational intent. Rather than describe, their goal is to conjure up new modes of economisation. But do these new modes of economisation really eliminate waste or do they implicitly reinscribe current arrangements? How do they reorganise relations between waste/economy/ecology? And can economies and ecologies exist without waste? Recognising that drawing and diagramming have played a pivotal role in diverse economies scholarship this workshop invites participants to explore with us how we might re-draw the circle. How does economic diversity challenge concepts of circularity and waste?