no. 71, July 2025

Junk

Edited by Amedeo Policante and Andrea Pavoni

 

Junk is everywhere: a constantly growing, amorphous and unvalued mass accumulating at the fringes of global ecologies, urban geographies and bodily physiologies. Critical literature is filled with discussions of junk food, junk bonds, junk data, space junk and junk DNA. However you look at junk there seems to be, by definition, always too much of it. Junk invades your mailbox, floods your hardware, clogs your arteries. Junk threatens to fill the entirety of space, letting little room for everything else. Recently, with growing horror, NASA has denounced that space junk may soon make space travel impossible, imposing an abrupt end to persisting dreams of cosmic escape.

And yet, despite the multiple denunciations of junk’s multiple threats to society, the circulation of junk is ubiquitous and persistent. If Marx once posed that “the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities,” what is junk? According to Rem Koolhaas, junkspace is “what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout”. According to William Burroughs, junk imposes its own logic of addiction and compulsive accumulation: it is, precisely in this sense, “the ideal product… the ultimate merchandise”.

With this special issue of lo Squaderno, we aim to collectively explore the proliferation of junk that defines contemporary societies. We are interested in political histories, geographies, anthropologies and economies of junk in its multiple forms. What is junk? How does it operate? How can we think about ‘junk space’, ‘junk time’ and ‘junk ecologies’? Where does junk originate from? How does it circulate through global ecologies? What type of life-worlds are built and unbuilt by and through junk?

 

 

|Deadline for Abstracts: include a brief description outlining how your submission addresses themes outlined in the call for papers. The abstract should be no more than 300 words. | 15 February 2025

| Notification of acceptance | 1 March 2025

| Final submission deadline | 15 April 2025

| Articles’ length | 2,000 words

| Submit to | losquaderno≤at≥gmail≤.≥com

| Information about the Journal | http://www.losquaderno.net/?page_id=2

| Information about the Editorial Process + Author’s Submission Checklist | http://www.losquaderno.net/?page_id=1082