Professor Olli Pyyhtinen has been awarded a Consolidator Grant of nearly €2 million by the European Research Council (ERC). The WasteMatters project will begin next autumn and it examines society and humanity through the lens of waste from a relational perspective.
The project disrupts the waste-as-resource paradigm prevalent in the circular economy related politics, business, and scholarship alike, and examines our contemporary trashscapes beyond the idea(l) of the eternal redemption of waste. Its will analyse the leaky realities of waste as integral to the human condition and as constitutive of society. The project explores the implications of waste throughout society and what waste does for/to us; what kind of relations, agencies, and spatiotemporal scales it assumes, prompts, enacts, and sustains; to what kind of futures society commits itself with it; and what humans become with waste.