In collaboration with Dr Ruth Ezra and Dr Francesca Borgo (Art History, University of St Andrews), this seminar hosts early career researchers to present creative methodological approaches to studying waste materials from the archive to the field:

Aishwarya Mukhopadhyay (Anthropology, Oxford). Following the Dustbin: Stories of Waste and Governance in Siliguri, India.
The “social life of materials” offers a powerful lens, yet studying waste through it quickly falters: waste is too dispersed, multiple, and unruly for a single trajectory to be traced by a lone researcher. I turn instead to the dustbin as an anchor—an object meant to discipline urban life yet constantly escaping its script. In Siliguri, India, state-issued bins spiral into improvisation: repurposed for storage, ignored, or withheld altogether. Following the dustbin makes visible a unique methodology—stories of waste that expose not only material lives but also the limits of governing them through aesthetics, bureaucracy, and fragile infrastructures.

Dr. Eiko Soga (Fine Art, Oxford). Traditional Ainu Cooking Among More-Than-Human World in Samani in Hokkaido, Japan.
Focusing on indigenous Ainu food culture among more-than-human world in Japan, I will discuss Ainu foraging and cooking processes that respect animals, insects, and whole natural environment. Through this I will discuss an ecological world that embodies waste free approach to life. Based on my time in Samani in Hokkaido, Japan, I will share wisdoms and lived memories that I learn from the Ainu community there.

Mwangi Mwaura (Geography, Oxford). Sales Dairies: Mathematics of Harm, Evidence of Planetary/Environmental Stewardship.
Through sales diaries by traders of second-hand clothes at Gikomba Market, Nairobi, I will share methodological insights learnt from ongoing sell-along ethnography. In this research on second-hand clothes in Nairobi and the UK, I have come to appreciate the records traders keep as calculations of items they get in bales from the West. In these calculations, one can follow the harm that is discarded into countries in the Global South, such as Kenya, while also seeing the Planetary/Environmental Stewardship these traders enact when they sort things, including into the lowest value. The sorting determines what happens to the commodity, including how it will be reintroduced into a value chain.

Dr Martha Swift (English, Oxford). Rubbish, Recycling and Regeneration: Chinese Science Fiction and Creating with Waste.
My recent work on waste thinks about its ontological instability and creative potential. In my talk, I will give a short overview of my research on waste in contemporary Chinese science fiction and the ways in which award-winning texts like Waste Tide and Folding Beijing destabilise the theoretical concepts of codification and recycling. These and other texts introduce ‘regeneration’ as an alternative theoretical—and possibly creative—approach to waste. I have been thinking about how to explore this creative potential beyond academic argument, and I will outline some of the waste-based, collaborative land-art and public performance initiatives that I have been engaged in over the last year.