Writing

BOOKS
Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City.

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

Claiming the Virgin: The Broken Promise of Liberation Theology in Brazil.
New York: Routledge, 1997.

DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP
DSNY Oral History Archive (founder) / 2011 – present

Discard Studies (co-founder, with Max Liboiron) / 2010 – present

SELECTED ARTICLES & ESSAYS

The Job is in the Field: Notes from Municipal Anthropology. Journal of Business Anthropology 6(1): 41-57 (2017). [.pdf]

Material Remains: The Perpetual Challenge of Garbage. Scientific American, October 25, 2013

The Many Mysteries of MSW. CASTAC blog (Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing), September 4, 2013

New York City; Politics of Waste. Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage. Carl Zimring and William Rathje, eds. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage Publications, 2012.

How to Find Mongo and Other Lessons from the Field. Anthropology Now 3(1):66-72 (2011)

The History and Future of Fresh Kills. In Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, N. Monem, ed. London: Profile Books, 2011

To Love a Landfill. In Handbook of Regenerative Landscape Design, R. France, ed. London: Taylor & Francis/CRC Press, 2008

Because Computers Don’t Compost. Review of High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, by Elizabeth Grossman. Science 316 (4 May); p69-70. (2007)

Sacred Geographies. Fresh Kills: Artists Respond to the Closing of the Landfill, K. Conte et al., eds. Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Staten Island, NY, 2002

Why We Love to Hate San Men. Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. 55 (May 2001)

Review of Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race and Popular Christianity in Brazil, by John Burdick. Ethnos 65(1):138-9 (2000)

’Pelo Direito de Ser Igreja:’ The Story of the Morro da Conceição. In The Church at the Grassroots in Latin America: Perspectives on Thirty Years of Activism, J. Burdick and W.E. Hewitt, eds. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000

Liberation Theology’s Rise and Fall. In The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, R. Levine and J. Crocitti, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999

A Plague in the Villages. In AIDS and the Media, by James Kinsella. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1997