The matter, politics, spatial and labor dynamics of global waste plays a crucial, albeit frequently erased, role in our pandemic now. The understories of pandemic waste impacts are vast, and often framed in terms of loss: from grappling with food system and supply chain losses, to techniques for avoiding spoilage; from popular narratives of lock-down effects on single-use plastics, to PPE and hospital refuse management. Wastewater tracing, however, has gained particular interest and praise as a tactic of revaluing waste amidst outbreak. I examine the viral politics of sewer-shed epidemiological tracing trends as a complex tool for SARS-CoV-2 public health management and increased surveillance.

A short visual history of the Four-level Stack interchange, considering its early presentation as an engineering marvel, its symbolic role in film and TV, how it has come to signify urban complexity and machine intelligence as well as being a contested site of exclusion.

Stamatopoulou-Robbins exposes how waste management is used to control the exposure of Palestinian bodies to slow violence, as an alternative to direct Israeli military violence, which is condemned by the international community.

In a piece focused on time and its infrastructural entanglements, Zannah Matson examines how the promise of infrastructure structures our relationship to the future, and thinks alongside the unfinished and interrupted forms that infrastructures often take.

In her sweeping and magisterial new book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, Laleh Khalili highlights the centrality of shipping and maritime infrastructure to global capitalism.