This course will delve into the commonplace yet complex worlds of the thrown away, and by extension, the excluded, and the marginal. We will explore how processes of discarding are central to making, conceiving, and maintaining difference; how these processes are also central to making the self and identity; and how these processes are particular and historical and entangled in power relations. We will explore habits like going to the bathroom and use-and throw consumption as cultural phenomena; the production and movement of different wastes across the planet and the forces and relations that make them possible; and practices of waste management, protest, art-work, and forensics that encounter, manipulate, and mobilize the material and symbolic properties of different kinds of discards. Students will engage with a number of concepts and methods to explore and analyze these complex worlds of which they are a part, and that are a part of them.