The decaying stuff of the Anthropocene: exploring contemporary trashscapes through ruination
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In this article, we take the notion of ruination beyond crumbling built structures and use it to explore contemporary trashscapes. With the waste produced by humanity scaling up to encompass the entire planet, we examine life with and in the ruins of the Anthropocene, where there is no Away to which the rejectamenta could be expelled and thus set apart from humans. On the one hand, we scrutinise waste as matter in a ruined state, subject to and resulting from a process of ruination; waste is a trace of an anterior presence that remains and continues to haunt us. On the other hand, we argue that collective wastage is turning the natural environment itself into ruins and landscapes into trashscapes. Towards the end of the article, we also stress the disruptive qualities of ruination and decay and discuss the renewed sensibilities evoked by waste. A life with waste in a world of Anthropocenic ruination amounts to a life that is not in complete control of itself but rather is inextricably entangled with otherness.
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(c) Olli Pyyhtinen, Stylianos Zavos, Alma Onali, Ulla-Maija Sutinen, Niina Uusitalo, 2022
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Olli Pyyhtinen, Tampere University
Professor of Sociology and the founder of Relational Studies Hub (RS Hub) at Tampere University, Finland. His research intersects social theory, philosophically inclined fieldwork, STS, economic sociology, and the study of art, and he is the author of for example More-than-Human Sociology (Palgrave, 2015), The Simmelian Legacy (Palgrave, 2018), The Gift and its Paradoxes (Routledge, 2014), and Simmel and ‘the Social’ (Palgrave, 2010). Currently, Pyyhtinen is leading two projects on waste and the circular economy, WasteMatters (ERC Consolidator Grant, 2022-2027) and DECAY (Academy of Finland 2022-2026), and a project on contemporary gift practices (Kone Foundation, 2021-2024).
Stylianos Zavos, Tampere University
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere University working for the WasteMatters project. Prior to that, he was Research Associate at the University of Manchester. He co-edited the volume Urban Infrastructuring: Reconfigurations, Transformations and Sustainability in the Global South (2022). Stylianos’ background is in architectural and urban studies. His research is transdisciplinary: broadly situated within the social sciences and employing ethnographic methods, it borrows from contemporary philosophical currents and feminist technoscience.
Alma Onali, Tampere University
Doctoral researcher at Tampere University working for the WasteMatters project. She is interested in socio-material human-plastic relations and how these relations are currently re-negotiated. Prior to her academic endeavors, Onali worked as a journalist focusing on environmental and economic affairs. She draws from material culture studies, posthumanist theories, and more-than-human sociology.
Ulla-Maija Sutinen, Tampere University
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere University. She works as a member of the WasteMatters project team and, in her current work, she especially focuses on following households’ waste streams connected to everyday practices. Ulla-Maija's background is in (social) marketing and consumer research and her research interests revolve around everyday practices, sustainable consumption and waste. She focuses on qualitative, interpretive methodologies.
Niina Uusitalo
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere University, currently working in the DECAY – Disrupted Waste Flows in a Broken World project. Uusitalo’s background is in media and communication studies. In her post-doctoral project, Envisioning climate change (2019–2023), she studied the aesthetics of climate change images. Her theoretical interests lie in eco-philosophy, new materialism and visual studies.
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