Rubbish deaths: Violence and the environment in Durban, South Africa

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Durban, South Africa, this article examines how environmental violence, masculinity, and inequality intersect in the context of the 2022 floods. Through the stories of three men: Barry, an unlikely conservationist; Peace, a young man living on the urban margins; and Roland, a disaster responder, we trace how crises are lived and gendered across race and class.

Through the case study of Durban, the authors argue that disaster is not a discrete event but a condition that reveals the social hierarchies sustaining everyday precarity. They introduce the concept of rubbish deaths to highlight how lives are rendered disposable, within overlapping systems of neglect and where waste operates as both a material and symbolic category. By foregrounding masculinity as a marker through which environmental and structural violence are embodied, the concept of rubbish deaths allows us to trace how crisis shapes everyday lives and socialities.