Turning Trash into Treasure: Shadow Economies and Uninvited Ecologies in Southwest China

This talk traces entanglements between excess matter and marginalized people in (post-)socialist southwest China. Out of these entanglements, life sustaining relations are often made athwart shifting plantation regimes of production as well as waste management regimes of containment and waste reutilization. I move between practices of making new worlds out of proliferating garbage in Kunming City and the contested relations which extend out from rubber tree plantation excesses in southern Yunnan