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 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 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 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 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 senior researcher, Ethnology Institute, Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW), University of Amsterdam. She focuses on food, bodies, water, waste, infrastructures and sustainability. She is developing a new research approach to the relational study of the agricultural greenhouse complex, focusing empirically on the foci of horticultural production in the Netherlands and Spain. Both rely on similar infrastructures (greenhouses) and address water, waste, plants, and labor as resources to be managed.
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.
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 an Assistant Professor, Unit of Social Anthropology, Department of Social Sciences, University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She works at the intersection of anthropology and architecture. She leads the SNSF-funded PRIMA-project “Urban Bricolage. Mining, Designing and Constructing With Reused Building Materials“ (2022-2026) which investigates the social practices of reuse of building materials and the implementation of circular construction in the building sector in Europe. Her foci in research and teaching are: circular economy, architectural anthropology, waste anthropology, infrastructure, urban political ecology and material culture with a regional focus on China and Europe.
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 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 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 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 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.
