Waste Regime
Waste Regime
Principal Investigator: Daniel Sosna
Team Members: Pavel Mašek, Barbora Stehlíková
The project aims at studying the contemporary waste regime associated with the Czech Republic. This regime faces dramatic changes such as a shift from landfilling to incineration, increasing mobility of waste, and reconceptualization of the linear model of resource management. Zsuzsa Gille’s concept of waste regime enables us to analyse how materiality, social practices, classification, asymmetries in power, and economic processes related to waste co-constitute the social. In this perspective disposal is imagined as a door that opens various ways for the transformation of value. It is not just a final solution responsible for the disappearance of the unwanted. Three ethnographers will examine divergent waste trajectories constructed along the three different analytical axes: 1. landfilling and incineration of municipal solid waste, 2. disposal of cars, and 3. disposal of electronics. The research will generate a reflection of the contemporary waste management and contribute to the understanding of the internal dynamics of waste regimes and their social effects.
