CALL FOR PAPERS
Waste Matters: Beyond Containment
Conference, 10-11 June 2027 in Helsinki, Finland
Venue: Cable Factory
Waste is among the defining concerns of our time. Yet in wider public and institutional discourse it is frequently approached through a logic of technical solutionism. Waste is cast as a problem to be solved through smarter technologies, more efficient infrastructures, improved policy instruments and circular business innovations. Within the circular economy policies and programmes, waste is increasingly reimagined as a resource to be captured, harnessing its latent capacities to create economic value. At the same time, waste never fully submits to these ambitions. It accumulates, leaks, contaminates and decays. Despite extensive efforts to govern, measure, classify, monitor and utilise waste, it persistently reveals the limits of containment and control.
The conference Waste Matters: Beyond Containment invites participants to explore waste not simply as an object of management but as a social, political, material and conceptual challenge that unsettles established categories, systems and modes of governance. Rather than focusing primarily on how waste management can be made more efficient, the conference asks how waste comes to be defined, generated, governed, valued and contained in the first place. What forms of knowledge, infrastructure, expertise and power make waste manageable? What remains in excess of these arrangements? What can moments of leakage, breakdown, disruption, contamination and decay reveal about the limits of contemporary projects of control and optimisation? And how could waste generate unexpected alliances, affective encounters and political imaginaries, opening up alternative ways of relating to matter, value, ethical responsibility and living together?
We welcome contributions that engage with waste across a wide range of theoretical, empirical and methodological concerns. We are particularly interested in work that moves beyond instrumental approaches to waste and explores its ontological, political, ethical, affective, temporal and spatial dimensions. Contributions from across the social sciences, humanities, arts and interdisciplinary fields are warmly encouraged. We also warmly welcome non-traditional formats (incl. artistic research and other experimental modes of inquiry).
Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
- Theories, concepts and ontologies of waste
- Waste, excess, residue and remainder
- Practices and politics of containment
- Waste infrastructures and systems of governance
- Critiques of technical solutionism and circular economy thinking
- Material vitality, decay and transformation
- Temporalities of waste: persistence, latency and afterlives
- Spatialities and scales of waste
- Measuring, classifying and monitoring waste
- Waste valorisation
- Waste and capitalism
- Waste, labour and maintenance
- Repair, reuse and circularity
- Waste and social inequalities
- Environmental justice and waste politics
- Waste colonialism
- Global circulation of discards
- Toxicity, pollution and contamination
- Waste activism and community responses
- More-than-human perspectives on waste
- Waste in the arts and humanities
- Methodologies for studying waste
- Waste and the Anthropocene
Through this conference, the 5-year ERC project WasteMatters concludes. We warmly invite scholars, practitioners, artists and activists to join us in this celebration reflecting on the project’s journey and exploring how waste matters, not only as a material problem to be managed, but as a phenomenon that reveals fundamental questions about order, power, value and the conditions of collective life.
The two-day conference is organised 10-11 June 2027 in Helsinki, Finland, at the cultural house Kaapelitehdas (an old cable factory building). The conference will combine panels with roundtables, workshops, and art events. Options for online or hybrid participation will not be available, unfortunately. We have two keynote speakers: Prof. Myra J. Hird (Queen’s University) and Gay Hawkins (Western Sydney University).
Please send your abstract of no more than 250 words and a short bio (max 150 words) by 18 December 2026 to wastemattersconference@tuni.fi. Decisions will be delivered in January 2027.
Registration fee: 120 € (scholars and artists with institutional support); 60 € (scholars and artists without institutional support).