PhD Oral Exam - Stephanie Mary Rose Eccles, Geography

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

As consensus sharpens regarding the social, ecological, and climate harms perpetuated by industrial capitalist animal agriculture, corporate-driven, government-subsidized efforts intensify. In this dissertation, I examine the role of industrial animal wastes in these efforts, analyzing how waste management practices function as accumulation strategies by exploiting waste frontiers. I draw from interviews and fieldwork conducted in North Carolina and British Columbia and insights from political ecology, agrarian studies, waste studies, and animal geographies. This manuscript-based dissertation centers on industrial animal waste management practices in the context of the agricultural industry framed as both a victim of and contributor to the climate crisis. I examine how waste-to-energy projects convert biowaste into contested renewable energy through the techno-fix of anaerobic digesters. In North Carolina, unwavering government support enables the pig industry to capitalize on the energy transition. By tracing the political developments that fostered the alliance between “Big Agriculture” and “Big Energy,” this research argues that biogas projects perpetuate patterns of uneven racialized development. These patterns are evident in the legacies of the sprayfield lagoon system and the Smithfield Agreement, where efforts to phase-out these waste systems were undermined in favour of extracting value from waste. Central to this process is the systemic devaluation of the bodies, environments, and futures of racialized, Indigenous, and low-income communities. In addition, I explore the production and management of industrial animal waste during climate change related disasters. I argue that waste management logic, informed by confinement practices, shapes disaster governance by keeping farmed animals confined. Institutional policies disincentivize mitigation, rewarding inaction through disaster relief mechanisms. Specifically, I engage with the emergence of post-disaster waste economies and processes, where value is derived from the decomposing bodies of farmed animals through the recovery of energy and nutrients. Together, these findings highlight the persistence of agricultural exceptionalism, which entrenches industrial practices and delays the adoption of socially just, sustainable practices, particularly by situating it as an emerging key player in the renewable energy transition. This dissertation demonstrates how industrial animal agriculture's waste management strategies intersect with environmental injustice, energy transitions, and climate-induced disasters, underscoring the need for interdisciplinary research and cross-movement organizing to resist the entrenchment and expansion of industrial animal agriculture through waste frontiers.