About Me

Hi! I am a critical human geographer and urban ethnographer whose research interests focus on the relationship between commodities, labor and the environment. My research draws from political economic, STS, de/anti/post-colonial and political ecology approaches to study economies and cultures of waste and repair, and more broadly, hidden forms of environmental labor. Since 2018 I am Assistant Professor of Environmental Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

While at LSE, I have been involved in trade union work, serving as branch chair (2024-2025), vice chair, equality officer, and on negotiating committees.

Prior to my entry into academia, I worked on urban environmental issues in New York City, working for the Department of Sanitation and the Parks Department.

I have recently changed my last name from Corwin to Cohen, to return to my family’s original name, but continue to publish under Corwin.

I can be reached at j.e.corwin@lse.ac.uk.

Research

Through my work, I explore the relationships between commodity production, use, and wasting. I argue that repair work provides a template for understanding and living in our current times of economic, political and environmental turmoil, by studying neglected things, neglected people and neglected work processes.

My first project was an ethnography of electronic waste and electronics repair in Delhi, India, in which I focused on global flows of electronic ‘waste’ and their revaluation through economies of repair and re-manufacturing. Conducted through a patchwork ethnography of local markets, warehouses and factories, I explored the connections between India’s informal economy and global electronics production networks. I have a forthcoming book with MIT Press (Autumn 2026), Analog Labor in a Digital World: E-Waste in India and the Politics of Repair.

My second, ongoing research project examines the environmental and economic significance of local electronics repair shops in London. This project focuses on conceptualizing an alternative circular economy distinct from the common focus on continued commodity production.

Analog Labor in a Digital World

Analog Labor in a Digital World: E-Waste in India and the Politics of Repair (forthcoming with MIT Press, Autumn 2026)

Analog Labor in a Digital World is about the things in our lives and our lives with things. It is about how we make and remake them, how they connect us, and how we connect them. It is, more specifically, about everyday electronics and how they are wasted in the 21st century – and the skilled repair workers that repurpose and reinvent high-tech, digital devices. While most of us use and depend on these technologies daily, we rarely see the labor that goes into making, selling, and repairing them. Through a patchwork ethnography of India’s diverse used electronics industries, I examine the often invisible yet vital labor of electronics repair, remanufacturing and informal trade that makes electronics economies work. From the local electronics repair shop to major electronics manufacturers and e-waste recyclers, I show the interdependence of people, materials, communities and seemingly separate economic systems and reveal a globally connected world of commodity production, wasting and revaluation.

Rather than being composed of peripheral labor processes feeding off the detritus of the formal economy, Analog Labor in a Digital World demonstrates that India’s electronic ‘waste’ sector is in fact a powerful source of value (and product) creation that is integral to the functioning of global commodity production. Our collective reliance on this labor –which makes, sustains, and repairs things – is masked by increasingly diffuse and opaque production processes and the rapid disposal of things. This local perspective, gleaned from sitting in scrap shops and wandering through dusty warehouses in India, explores what can be learned about labor, supply chain capitalism and environmental problems from the supposed underside or rubbish side of commodity production.

Teaching

My teaching has spanned a variety of human and environmental geography courses. Currently, my undergraduate teaching focuses on critical understandings of sustainable development; you can watch an intro video developed for my sustainable development course here.

I teach a postgraduate course, Urban Environments and More-Than-Human Cities, which features an optional creative component for the final assessment. I design my courses and assessment options to support neurodiverse learning.

I supervise PhD students across a range of PhD programmes; I am interested in supervising projects at the intersection of labour and environment, in particular looking at commodity production, informal economies, and/or waste and repair. Potential students can email me at j.e.corwin@lse.ac.uk.

Publications

  • Corwin, J. The Analog City: Maintaining Everyday Life Through Repair and Jugaad. IJURR (forthcoming)
  • Millington, N.; Scheba, S.; Ponder, S.; Paterniani, S.; Knuth, S.; Kemmer, L.; de Coss-Corzo, A.; Corwin, J. Making Repair Reparative. (forthcoming)
  • Corwin, J. and V. Gidwani. (2025). Repair Work as Care: On Maintaining the Planet in the Capitalocene. Antipode, 57(5): 1685-1704. doi: 10.1111/anti.12791
  • Corwin, J. (2023). Recuperating labor’s environmental potential. Dialogues in Human Geography, 13(2): 259-262. doi: 10.1177/20438206221144817
  • Corwin, J. (2020). Between Toxics and Gold: Devaluing Informal Labor in the Global Urban Mine. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 31(4): 106–123. doi: 10.1080/10455752.2019.1690533
  • Corwin, J. (2018). “Nothing is useless in nature”: Delhi’s repair economies and value-creation in an electronics “waste” sector. Environment and Planning A, 50(1), 14–30. doi: 10.1177/0308518X17739006
  • Gidwani, V., and J. Corwin. (2017). Governance of Waste. Economic and Political Weekly. LII (31): 44-54.