Film Screening: The Waste Commons & Director/ Protagonist Q&A

Join us for a screening of the documentary The Waste Commons and a Q&A with director Dr Rosalind Fredericks (NYU) and waste picker protagonist Aliou Faye (Zidane) from Dakar's Bokk Diom Association.

About the film: Enclosing open-air dumps and outlawing waste picking are key approaches to modernizing cities around the world. THE WASTE COMMONS explores the dramatic transformations involved in the impending closure of the city waste dump in Dakar, Senegal, and the lives that hang in the balance. It follows charismatic Zidane, trailblazing Adja, and their waste picker community, as they battle to defend their carefully crafted worlds and rights to waste.

About Rosalind Fredericks:
Rosalind (Rozy) is an urban geographer and Associate Professor at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized study, specializing in urban environmental social movements in West Africa. She has been working in Senegal for over 20 years conducting research on the politics of waste labor in Dakar. Her book Garbage Citizenship, which was awarded the Toyin Falola Book Award for the best book in African Studies, chronicled the municipal waste workers' union as it battled for respect and improved working conditions in the wake of structural adjustment. She also edited two volumes with esteemed historian Mamadou Diouf on citizenship in African cities: ​Les arts de la citoyenneté au Sénégal: ​E​spaces contestés et civilités urbaines (Editions Karthala, 2013) and The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities: Infrastructures and Spaces of Belonging (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). Fredericks is the co-director of the Discard Studies Collaborative at NYU. The Waste Commons emerged out of her ethnographic research (supported by a major grant from the National Science Foundation) at Dakar's dump since 2016 and her advocacy work with the association of Mbeubeuss waste pickers and the non-profit organization WIEGO that defends the rights of informal workers globally. It is her first documentary film.