Waste in Motion. Mobilisations of waste and pollutants as socio-material configuration

• Applicant: Dr. Yusif Idies
• Subject Area: Human Geography ; Empirical Social Research ; Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 503738037

Dealing with ever increasing quantities of extremely mobile waste and pollutants is considered one of the most serious socio-ecological challenges of our time. Though, waste as a research object in the social and cultural sciences has received only scant attention in German-speaking human geography and neighbouring disciplines. The proposed network addresses this gap by developing an interdisciplinary research perspective inspired by Anglo-American waste and discard studies. From this perspective, waste and waste flows are studied specifically as an effect of socio-material relations of things, social practices and infrastructures. Hence, the conceptual approach centres on the processes and practices of mobilising waste. The objective of the network's research programme is to identify and understand these processes and practices more precisely along three central conceptual lines and thus contribute to more sustainable ways of acting: First, socio-material practices of transformation are examined in the context of the assessment and classification of waste (“mobilisation as transformation”). Second, it analyses how pollutants and waste are set in motion and configured due to their material properties, social and material relations (“Materialisation in relations”). Based on the persistence of modern waste, third, emphasis is placed on the role of temporality – consequences of disposal that cannot be resolved once for all are questioned and possible alternative practices of caring are explored (“temporalities of caring”). The main goal of the network is to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue on waste research in the social and cultural sciences. This is to generate a long-term interdisciplinary research cooperation on the network topic, which will also contribute to a stronger perception of this area of research beyond the funding period. Within this framework, the publication of a German-language open access handbook (1) is planned, which will frame the content-related work along the above mentioned conceptual lines and will open up the emergent field of waste and discard studies for German-language research and teaching. As part of the development of a common conceptual toolbox, a website will bundle the results of the collaborative work process and make them publicly visible in the form of an online glossary (2) and visual storytelling (“Scrollytelling”) (3). As a further outcome, both the networking contacts and the content-related discussions are to be sustained beyond the funding period in view of initiating the application for an international research project (4).

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Sven Bergmann