Introduction

Although the act of labelling cultural practices or products as trash is often framed as a casual dismissal based on self-evident assumptions, it can in fact be viewed as a mechanism which reflects, perpetuates and justifies the power dynamics of the social context. Trash theorists have argued that our relationship to material trash should be denaturalised and recognised as socio-culturally situated, but should the same not also apply to our relationship to trash culture? The contributions to this special issue all aim to denaturalise trash cultures in the Francophone world through critical and reflexive analyses which tease out social and power dynamics specific to the social context in question.