Presenter: Professor Crispin Thurlow, University of Bern, Switzerland

Date and time: Wednesday 25 February 2026, 1pm-2.30pm

Place: Microsoft Teams (joining link shown on the confirmation screen after you register)

Please register via: https://forms.office.com/e/HXh8ypWn8U

In-person attendance: This is a hybrid event. The form above is for online registration only. Please see the event page for in-person details at the University of Leeds: https://www.latl.leeds.ac.uk/events/disciplining-play-multimodal-waste-pedagogies-and-the-making-of-green-citizens-prof-crispin-thurlow/

Abstract

Emerging from my larger Articulating Rubbish project, this presentation considers the mediatized ways in which waste is made meaningful and governable. Specifically, I examine children’s toys as key sites of public pedagogy through which green citizenship and environmental ethics are shaped from an early age. The presentation draws on a social semiotic analysis of recycling trucks produced by three global brands: Fisher-Price, Playmobil, and LEGO. Attending to representational, compositional, and interpersonal meanings, I show how the trucks’ multimodal design features (e.g., colour, texture, narrative detail, and material affordances) encode particular classifications, systems, and infrastructures of waste. The analysis is situated theoretically through Gay Hawkins’ account of waste as an ethical project and Michel Foucault’s notion of pastoral power, arguing that the toys function as material-semiotic technologies for producing children as “sorting subjects.” In other words, they are guided into specific ways of knowing and doing waste that normalize individual responsibility and depoliticize broader questions of production/consumption. Despite their pedagogical appeal, the toys reduce “saving the planet” to proper sorting and self-management, offering children little preparation for their environmental futures.

About the speaker

Crispin Thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He is affiliate professor in both the Centre for the Study of Language and Society at Bern and in the Centre for Diversity Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He serves on the editorial boards of journals such as Language in Society, Visual Communication, and Critical Discourse Studies. More information about his work can be found at: www.crispinthurlow.net.