To address the relationship between the crises of capitalist growth and democratic politics, this paper discusses the notions of degrowth and conviviality. Both concepts are often interpreted as making similar proposals in response to questions of environmental transformation. However, they bear on different strands of critique. While degrowth criticizes the momentum of capitalist accumulation, conviviality originates in the search for alternatives to the instrumental use of technologies in industrial societies. Although these two rationalities predominantly go hand in hand in the development of modern societies, they are sometimes in conflict and different strategies are required to deal with their consequences. Therefore, the differences between degrowth and conviviality should not be obscured. Instead of using the concepts in an ethical or moral fashion as normative claims directed at some diffuse agency of states, companies and the people, the paper argues for a thorough examination of issues and propositions to overcome the environmental crisis from the perspective of materialist science and technology studies. Since one key factor here is the level of global production and consumption of meat, this paper turns toward a controversial attempt to break new ground in meat production: the vision of artificially producing meat in the laboratory. Lab-grown, cultured meat provides a powerful case study for exploring political and democratic challenges of post-growth societies, all the more so as questions of animal welfare and interspecies conviviality are addressed as well. By taking a closer look at the role of animals in proposed solutions for degrowth and conviviality in meat production and consumption, the complementarity of such claims can be questioned, and a light can be shed on the inherent political implications of such technological innovations.

In this text, we offer a vision of waste as integral and immanent to valuation practices and argue that engaging with waste materials can thereby significantly contribute to the field of valuation studies. We lay special emphasis on the intertwined practices and processes of assembling and disassembling value and waste. Creating value is a process of joining together: classifying, grouping, combining, making, re-forming. Yet it is also a process where persons, things, parts of bodies, or landscapes are disentangled, abandoned, dismissed, or corrupted. The notion of disassembly attracts attention not only to the center of the action of valuation but also to its peripheries—to things and materials which are cast aside, to spaces which accommodate that which has been disassembled, and the ambiguities and potentialities opened up by processes of disassembly. Thinking with waste also pushes us to think about how various regimes of value are connected and how they coexist and/or compete. As such, waste is not a coherent thing, but rather one that gets displaced and transformed in valuing practices which coexist in various ways.

Electronic waste is one of the biggest and dirtiest waste streams worldwide, endangering humans and non-humans especially in the 'global south'. The government of India issued a new law to deal with this issue in 2011: the ‘e-waste (Management and Handling) Rules’. This article reconstructs the process by which this law was developed over eight years with ethnographically collected data. It points particularly to the ways the law threatens parts of the informal sector. 'Refurbishers’, who repair used electronic items, are ignored—even though they initially played a crucial part in the newly composed value chain, including during early draft of the electronic waste law. Such informal practices were neglected because of the particular focus of the legislature on modern recycling. This occurred because of the eerie imagination attached to the object electronic waste. Based upon voices from the informal sector, an alternative to this imagination is introduced and critically discussed: 'juggad', a new ideal of the broken down. Taken together, the diplomatic endeavour in this article wants to do more than show that the values of informal sector practices such as refurbishment are not appreciated. The goal is to also describe why it is so hard to engage with these practices in the first place. Bruno Latour's new approach, developed in 'An Inquiry into Modes of Existence' (2013), helps unfolding the argument. This recent shift in the actor-network-theory (ANT) renders a postcolonial reconstruction of democracy feasible.

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The global economy of e-waste recycling has received much attention in recent waste studies literature. This article gives an account from the inside of two different sites within a leading high-tech recycling and smelting company in which such e-waste is assessed; and discusses the valuation of electronic waste in the course of its industrial processing. Based on a two-month long ethnography by way of an internship, the article examines how the recycler manages to distinguish and separate out valuable ‘scrap’, in contrast to valueless ‘waste’. The article subdivides the inquiry into two questions. What practices are involved when transforming e-waste into scrap and waste? And how can we appreciate differences in how they are configured? The study of two different facilities in operation next to one another provides additional leverage to the inquiry since the valuation practices involved when assessing the incoming e-waste differ between them. Differences are tied to specificities in how the electronics are sorted out, shredded, and smelted. The article shows how these processes of deformation are linked to the valuation practices and the accounting system of the company. Calculations, it is argued, succeed only because things are literally broken.

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