Inaugural Lecture - Crispin Thurlow, Ander visiting professor in geomedia studies
- 19 march, 14.30-16.00
- 1B309 (Sjöströmsalen)
- Karlstad University
- Mingle with drinks and snacks from 16:00
- Registration
Pastoral Power at Play: Mediatizing Waste and the Making of Green Citizens
Crispin Thurlow
Emerging from my larger Articulating Rubbish project, this presentation considers the mediatized ways in which waste is made meaningful and governable. Specifically, I examine children’s toys as key sites of public pedagogy through which green citizenship and environmental ethics are shaped from an early age.
The presentation draws on a social semiotic analysis of recycling trucks produced by three global brands: Fisher-Price, Playmobil, and LEGO. Attending to representational, compositional, and interpersonal meanings, I show how the trucks’ multimodal design features (e.g., colour, texture, narrative detail, and material affordances) encode particular classifications, systems, and infrastructures of waste.
The analysis is situated theoretically through Gay Hawkins’ account of waste as an ethical project and Michel Foucault’s notion of pastoral power, arguing that the toys function as material-semiotic technologies for producing children as “sorting subjects.” In other words, they are guided into specific ways of knowing and doing waste that normalize individual responsibility and depoliticize broader questions of production/consumption.
Despite their pedagogical appeal, the toys reduce “saving the planet” to proper sorting and self-management, offering children little preparation for their environmental futures.
