The WasteMatters project studies the vibrant nature and active role of waste in how we live together. Taking into account recent calls for sustainable global futures with regard to the circular economy and the waste-as-resource paradigm, the project follows waste flows ethnographically with an aim to problematise the vibrant nature and active role of waste in our lives and society. The research is carried out through four sub-studies across various sites in a number of countries with a focus especially - but not exclusively - on food waste, plastic waste, waste incineration ash, and nuclear waste. In the project, we follow waste streams across society. We map waste flows and attend to the respective processes of sorting out, discarding, reappropriating, transporting, processing, and (re)valuing; pay attention to how waste sticks by, tarnishes, grows mould, rots, and decomposes; and examine what happens to discards as they flow, spill over, leak, mix, and mutate. For us, waste is also an invitation to explore the potentials of a more-than-human onto-epistemology. Waste does more than just urge us to expand the universe of entities to non-humans that research must take into account; it asks us to consider our entanglement with the world of materials and their processes. Thereby, in waste we are interested also in the withness of thinking and knowing. Ultimately, the project studies waste to gain a better understanding of the contemporary world we are living in. The research explores the implications of waste throughout society and what waste does for/to us; what kind of relations, agencies, and spatiotemporal scales it assumes, prompts, enacts, and sustains; to what kind of futures society commits itself with it; and what humans become with waste.
The project has three overall objectives: to produce (1) new empirical knoweldge, (2) methodological innovation and (3) new theoretical ideas.
Empirically, the project will produce new knowledge of the movements of waste at all stages of its life cycle, increase our understanding of the leaky realities of and naturecultural entanglements with waste across society, paying also attention to what happens to waste in its circulation and how waste shapes us humans and our relations.
As for methodological innovation, in contrast to standard social scientific methods that give primacy to human agency and privilege language, meanings, and culture, the project will develop a relational more-than-human ethnography as a means to address and attend to the activity and dynamism of matter and our entanglement with it in empirical terms. It will bridge the gap between new materialist/posthumanist theories and empirical research, and thereby hopefully provide future research in several fields within the social sciences and humanities important methodological development with regard to avoiding human exceptionalism and examining the world in which we live as both a human and non-human world.
When it comes to theory, the project will create and refine conceptual and analytical tools to understand the co-constitution of waste and society and present a new scalar imagination for the social sciences and the humanities, attentive to the enactment and coming into being of the multiple spatiotemporal scales of our entanglement with waste matter in particular and of society more generally.
