Accumulation

Jennifer Gabrys is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project ‘Citizen sensing and environmental practice’.Gay Hawkins is a Professorial Research Fellow in social and cultural theory and Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.Mike Michael is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney.

"This is a book on materiality in contemporary life. It deals with an issue that is not new, and the book itself is not hot off the press, actually it was published three years ago. However, Accumulation can be considered an interesting nutshell of the current debate about the materiality and the heterogeneous complexity of society as well as about the strategies we use to investigate and unfold it."Dario Minervini,University of Naples

• Introduction: From Materiality to Plasticity Part I: Plastic Materialities 1. Plastics, Materials and Dreams of Dematerialization 2. Process and Plasticity: Printing, Prototyping and the Prospects of Plastic Part II: Plastic Economies 3. Made to Be Wasted: PET and Topologies of Disposability 4. The Material Politics of Vinyl: How the State, Industry and Citizens Created and Transformed West Germany’s Consumer Democracy 5. Paying With Plastic: The Enduring Presence of the Credit Card Part III: Plastic Bodies 6. The Death and Life of Plastic Surfaces: Mobile Phones 7. Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe: An Essay on Plasticity and the STS Life 8. Plasticizers: A Twenty-First Century Miasma 9. Plastics, the Environment and Human Health Part IV: New Articulations 10. Where Does This Stuff Come From? Oil, Plastic and the Distribution of Violence 11. International Pellet Watch: Studies of the Magnitude and Spatial Variation of Chemical Risks Associated with Environmental Plastics 12. Plastic and the Work of the Biodegradable