"Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men moves beyond ""hot take"" or straw man fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics, mobilized around plastics, reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change today. With attention to both on- and offline organizing in the Global South and the Global South of the North, Phaedra C. Pezzullo engages advocacy campaigns, public controversies, and policies through cogent analysis and interviews with headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the US, and Vietnam. She argues that plastics have become an articulator of crisis—an entry point into the contested contemporary environmental politics of carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments—and detachments—Pezzullo illustrates how readers can resist unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex through imperfect but impactful networked cultures of care."
By:
Phaedra C. Pezzullo
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: 4
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 41mm
Weight: 408g
ISBN: 9780520393646
ISBN 10: 0520393643
Series: Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 29 November 2023
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Contents Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Care amid Oceans of Trouble 1. #ThereIsNoAway: Carbon-Heavy Masculinity and the Life/Death Cycle of Plastics 2. Have a Coke and a #FootprintCalculator: The Myth of Recycling and Transnational Greenwashing 3. From #BanPlasticsKE to #ISupportBanPlasticsKE: Pissed Off Online, Picturing Participation, and Policing Pollution in Kenya 4. Engaging #StrawlessInSeattle and #StopSucking: The Loneliest Whale, Sporting Fun, and American Exceptionalism 5. #SuckItAbleism Intervenes: Eco-normative Shaming, Voicing Justice, and Planetary Fatalism 6. Creating #ToiChonCa (#IChooseFish): Trauma, Affective Art, and Big Tech Dominance Conclusion: #BreakFree(FromPlastics) Notes Bibliography Index
Phaedra C. Pezzullo is Associate Professor of Communication, Media Studies, Environmental Studies, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of multiple books, including Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. She is a founding codirector of the Center for Creative Climate Communication and Behavior Change.
