Dr. Robin Nagle Talks Trash as She Explains the Big Picture of What We Don’t Know About Garbage – Part One

Podcast Episode 058                                                  Release Date: April 22, 2016

On this podcast Dr. Robin Nagle, director of the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program at New York University talks about trash and how it affects our lives in ways we may not be aware of. Robin’s TED talk entitled “What I Discovered in New York City Trash” has gone viral, generating over 1.5 million unique views. Dr. Nagle is a clinical associate professor of anthropology and environmental studies at NYU and author of the book Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City, an ethnography of the New York City Department of Sanitation. Her book is based on a decade of work with the Department of Sanitation, which included time on the job working as a uniformed sanitation worker. Dr Nagle’s work looks at the relationship between trash and cities. Within this broader perspective, she is especially interested in the people, history, and politics that are always inherent to labors of waste. Robin is also fascinated by the many ways in which garbage is implicated in every contemporary environmental crisis worldwide. In fact, Robin views sanitation workers as Guardians who protect and insure public health and safety as well as being key contributors to economic prosperity. She says that the public owes a debt of gratitude to the men and women sanitation workers who help keep us safe, and that perhaps because they do their jobs so well, we may take them for granted. To learn more about Dr. Nagle or to book her as a speaker visit her website: https://robinnagle.com. You can also follow her at https://twitter.com/rznagle

 

 

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