is an Assistant Professor of Organisational Theory at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research is situated at the intersection of organisational sociology, economic sociology, rural sociology and valuation studies. She investigates the relationship between organisation, waste and responsibility, with a focus on the role of standards and standardization. Her empirical attention is directed to food (waste).
is senior researcher and curator at the German Maritime Museum – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History in Bremerhaven, Germany. At the institute, he coordinates the exhibition and research area Ship and Environment. Trained as a cultural anthropologist and STS researcher his research interests range from feminist technoscience, kinship, reproduction, and the body to political ecology, marine and environmental anthropology and economies of waste. In recent years, his research has focused on what he calls “speculative ecologies”, such as the problematisation of microplastics or underwater munition in the ocean.
is a postdoctoral researcher at the Soft Authoritarianisms Research Group as well as Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research and Sustainability Research Center at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her research interests include environmental politics, social movements, and authoritarianism. Her current research at Bremen University, funded by the Humboldt Foundation, examines waste trade between European countries and Turkey, with a specific focus on the workings of the political economy in Turkey.
is a research associate at the Institute for Cultural Analysis/European Ethnology at the University of Freiburg. In her dissertation project, she analyses how bio-based, material innovations are realized in the packaging industry as alternatives to established materials such as plastics. Her focus lies on the social-ecological transformations that are thereby negotiated. Ideas of circularity, alternative economic practices, non-human actors and waste infrastructures are central to the study.
is currently a PhD student at the International Doctoral Program “Nature-Culture” at Faculty of “Artes Liberales” University of Warsaw. She is working on a dissertation concerning the natural and cultural status of post-nuclear spaces on the examples of Chernobyl’s and Fukushima’s exclusion zones. She is a head of the research grant (Bio)discourse after Catastrophe. The Natural-Cultural Status of Nuclear Disasters in Chernobyl and Fukushima. She received the Fulbright Junior Research Award for the year 2022-2023 and is currently a Visitor Researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
is a science and technology studies scholar working with concept around petrochemicals and plastic materials. He defended his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Exeter, UK, and has held post-doctoral fellowship at Aarhus University, Denmark, and Wageningen University, Netherlands. Tridibesh has conducted fieldwork in Asia and Europe and is a former engineer of complex systems in waste and energy.
is working toward a Ph.D. at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. She is a part of the Emmy Noether Research Group “Hazardous Travels Ghost Acres and the Global Waste Economy,” funded by the German Research Foundation, where her work centers on hazardous waste trade, social inequalities, scrap recycling, and environmental activism. her work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Persistance of Technology: Histories of Repair, Reuse and Disposal, The SAGE Handbook of Global Social Theory, Soapbox Journal for Cultural Analysis, Environmental
is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. As a cultural anthropologist and feminist STS scholar, her work focuses on urban resilience, technological megaprojects, and environmental issues related to water scarcity and waste abundance, mainly in Southeast Asia and Europe. Moreover, Kathrin is particularly interested in how other forms of ethnographic knowledge can be creatively shaped to provide alternative responses to climate change. She is the author of “Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia. Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh” (Routledge, 2022).
is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography with Focus Posthuman Studies, Department of Geography and Regional Science, University of Graz, Austria. She works at the intersections of human geography, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies (STS). Her focus is on qualitative and ethnographic environmental research, relational political ecology, environmental justice and more-than-human geography.
is a research associate at the Graduiertenkolleg Medienanthropologie at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His dissertation project examines the media-technical operations involved in displacing waste from everyday perception, as well as its artistic re-visualization. In analyzing the reproductive forms of late capitalism, the research has mainly focused on exposing the aestheticization of commodities.
is currently a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Political Science and the Center for Interdisciplinary Sustainability Research at the University of Münster, Germany. His research is centered on issues of environmental politics and governance, with a particular focus on the areas of waste governance, food governance, the politics of sustainable consumption, and the democracy-environment nexus. Within the “Waste in Motion” network, his expertise lies in the analysis of political regulatory efforts, classificatory practices and control mechanisms of different “waste goods” and the resulting negative externalities across borders.
is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography, WWU Münster. He graduated in geography in Frankfurt am Main and completed his doctorate at the University of Leipzig on the socio-spatial relevance of sustainable consumption. Currently, his research focuses on critical approaches to sustainability, in particular on the geographies and economies of waste disposal. He is currently working on his habilitation project on local interventions against marine plastic residues and on the issue of landfilling of wastes that are not (or no longer) recyclable.
is a doctoral candidate in the DFG-funded RTG ‘minor cosmopolitanisms’ at the University of Potsdam. They research how a discard studies approach can be generative in the context of commercial colonialism in the Indian sub-continent. Their current contract is a 65% position with permission to stay in Germany till September 2023. Alongside their thesis, a longer-term project is to imagine velocities of academic work that nourish slow work and protect slow workers. Identifying speed as not only a property of work but a dimension that determines the work/er, they try to realize methods that anticipate failure and exhaustion.
studied Political Science and Gender Studies at the University of Vienna. From 2020 to 2023, she worked as a research assistant at the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development in Dresden. Among other things, she worked on the project “Gender in Spatial Sciences” and the BMBF-funded project “GiB_Raum: Gender Aspects in Spatial Sustainability and Transformation Research”. At the same time, she held teaching positions at the University of Vienna and the University of Leipzig. Since June 2023, Miriam Kienesberger has been a research associate at the Chair of Environmental Planning and Transformation at the University of Freiburg.
is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. She works at the intersection of Anthropology and (postcolonial and feminist) Science and Technology Studies with an interest in new materialism, feminist knowledge production and trans-disciplinarity in and beyond academia. Currently, Franziska is completing a dissertation examining the life of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in science, policy, and waste management (incineration). The dissertation, situated in between Tanzania and Norway maps a variety of connections organic pollutants engender as they hold different worlds together.
is a postdoctoral researcher at the ISOE – Institute for Social-Ecological Research, Frankfurt am Main. She works in the field of social-ecological research and new materialism. Currently her research interests focus on materiality of plastics and the social and scientific negotiation of risks of microplastics at the interface of science and politics. Furthermore, she is concerned with practices of consumption and with the socio-ecological impacts of marine litter in the Global South. She brings to the network topic-related expertise on (micro)plastic waste as well as conceptual expertise on materiality from a human geography perspective.
is a postdoctoral researcher with the collaborative research centre Virtual Worlds at Ruhr-University Bochum. There, he studies data centres: the entanglement of knowledge production and planetary resources. In general, he studies materiel politics of transformation processes. He published widely on waste and discard studies with a focus on e-waste.
is a doctoral researcher at at the Chair of Technical and Environmental Sociology at BTU Cottbus-Senftenber. In her dissertation project she analyses the impact of policy instruments (e.g. repair voucher programme) on users of electrical and electronic equipment and on companies operating in the electronics repair and remanufacturing sector. In her work, she explores possible orientations of future policy guidelines on resource efficiency, with a particular interest in a transition to a circular society.
is a cultural anthropologist and DJ and studies Empirical Cultural Analysis/Political Anthropology (MA) and Law in Graz. Their research interests lie in the entanglements and the queering of law and everyday life and intersectional justice. With regard to WiM, Anna is primarily active as an organizational staff member and, thanks to Max Liboiron and others, is increasingly interested in the topic of waste.
is a junior researcher at the University of Amsterdam, where – as part of the Clean Team – he researches how conflicting goods are combined and how different evils are treated in cleaning practices. In this work, he is particularly interested in the various problems with PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) and the possibilities to solve them. This includes possible solutions, navigating and confronting the different challenging versions of PFAS pollution. These will be part of a PhD project at Wageningen University.
her research interests shift around Degrowth and the discourse of Non-Extractive Architecture (N-EA) which challenges material extraction, labor markets, and the externalities of material practices and supply chains in the built environment
Her research project, called ”Non-Extractive Architecture and Regional Resource Cycles (N-EAR)”, uses the N-EA lens to uncover the socio-economic dimensions of Construction and Demolition (C&D) waste management in Luxembourg and the Greater Region. Simona explores the factors and forces that prevent the C&D practice from changing, by studying its governance, its labor dynamics, and the generation of value, whether monetary or socio-ecological.
is an associate professor at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. Her research interests focus on transformation of work, deindustrialisation, and postsocialism. As of recently, she is conducting fieldwork in the rural parts of central Croatia, researching on the impact of mega infrastructures projects, clean energy politics, and energy sovereignty on local communities.
is Professor of Sustainable Product Design at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and a member of the Kassel Institute for Sustainability at the University of Kassel. Her research interests include rituals of disappearance in physical and virtual environments, how design is informed by practices of discarding and how the phenomenon of waste can act as a proxy for didactics of sustainability. At the Kunsthochschule Kassel, she is also expanding the role of design research and its methods within the framework of socio-ecological research.
is a PhD candidate at the Department of Science, Technology and Society, Technical University of Munich. She is particularly interested in human-environment relations looking at exposure to environmental toxins in urban spaces (e.g. air pollution), which she methodically explores using ethnographies, expert interviews, and document analysis. Her analytical focus lies at the intersection of scientific knowledge cultures, new ontologies in the life sciences and reflections on the im/perceptibility of toxins taking a feminist STS perspective. Her dissertation project investigates how an epigenetic perspective is adopted in environmental toxicology and how this yields a more dynamic notion of toxicity as processual and relational.
is currently PhD candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. She primarily specialises in the fields of material culture and visual anthropology as well as their methodologies and their application in ethnographic research and museum displays. For her PhD project, Kiah studies the cultural significance of snow and winter in Swiss Alpine regions and the social, economic and political implications of their slow disappearance through a material lens. The project is focused on capturing negotiations of obsolescence about waste and potential for transformation between different human and non-human actors at this time of climatic unpredictability.
works as a consultant in legal management for the expansion of high-voltage grids and is a research assistant in cultural geography at the University of Bayreuth. He studied sociology, cultural anthropology and human geography in Frankfurt and Bayreuth. His research focuses on biopolitics, urban metabolism and STS. He is currently continuing his doctoral project on the negotiations of mold spores between waste, water and built infrastructures in urban areas.
is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Geography and Regional Science at the University of Graz, working at the intersection of urban political ecology, labour studies and waste & discard studies. Nicolas’s research is focused on the social, spatial and material production and handling of waste, pollution and other forms of externalised socionature in the context of uneven development. These processes are approached with an ethnographic interest in the labour of gathering, reclaiming and recycling, as well as the caring relations to things embroiled in such practices.
is a postdoctoral researcher at the STS Department, TU Munich. She is interested in human-environment relations and specifically in the increasing research, reporting and political regulation of plastics and waste in the environment. She has studied the media portrayal of microplastics, as well as the problematization of plastics among social actors, such as zero waste advocates. In her Erwin Schrödinger project (FWF Austria) she also focused on academic knowledge cultures in transition and the role of scientists in environmental change with a specific focus on marine sciences.
is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University Mainz. She investigates the role of nature in projects of nuclear waste management for high-level radioactive waste. Her research especially focuses on the collaboration between societies and bedrocks and geological formations, respectively. Her research interests are located within environmental sociology, sociology of knowledge and Science and Technology Studies. She works with theories of materiality, posthuman theories, and approaches of the sociology of scientific knowledge. Methodically she integrates ethnography, document analysis and interviews. Her expertise for the network consists in the integration of posthuman theories, qualitative methods, and a study of disposing of nuclear waste.
is an university assistant at the Department of Geography and Regional Science at the University of Graz and board member of the Austrian Association of Academic Geography. In his research he focuses on the making and unmaking of commodities, markets and Europeanization processes in Southeast Europe taking a more-than-human perspective.
is a junior researcher in the Anthropology of Health, Care, and the Body program group at the University of Amsterdam. He currently investigates diverse versions of ‘clean’ in households, industry, hospitals, wastewater treatment, policy, and ecotoxicology to understand how different ‘values’ come into being and are cared for alongside each other. In his upcoming research, he will focus on how agricultural veterinarians care for values in tension. He works at the intersection between discard studies and valuation studies, with material-semiotic and STS sensitivities.
