CALL FOR PAPERS: Waste Matters: The Many Afterlives of Junk Conference, 12-13 June 2025 in Helsinki, Finland

What happens to things after they have been discarded? At least one thing is certain: they do not just cease to exist once we feel we no longer have any use for them. Regardless of all human efforts to eliminate waste, it does not disappear but remains in an uncanny absence–presence, flows elsewhere or changes form. With the increasing prominence of the circular economy over the past couple of decades, waste-to-resource schemes have become the predominant manner to extend the life cycle of things. Yet, besides circulating across society in ways that are expected to promote economic growth and create new business opportunities, waste also flows and persists in unwanted, unruly ways. It cannot be completely controlled by techniques that manage, govern and exploit it, but it constantly escapes them and spills over. It is largely in its fluidity and ways of leaking that waste calls for us to act.

The conference Waste Matters: The Many Afterlives of Junk organised by the projects WasteMatters (ERC-cog, 2022–2027) and DECAY (Research Council of Finland, 2022–2026) welcomes contributions that engage with the generation and afterlives of waste. What does waste do for and to us? How to study waste as part of society, human relations and everyday practices? And how to attend to the life of waste that tends to undermine human sovereignty and control, ultimately shaping life on Earth? The papers may address a wide range of theoretical, empirical and methodological issues on the subject of the life of waste and living with waste from various disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives. Non-traditional formats (e.g. artistic research) are also warmly welcomed.

Tentative topics include but are not limited to:

- waste management

- waste-to-resource schemes

- circular economy

- waste trade

- waste and valuation

- global waste flows

- waste colonialism

- politics of waste

- waste and the Anthropocene

- tempo-material aspects of waste

- waste and affects

- sensing waste

- waste as data

- multispecies waste relations

- spatiotemporal scales of waste

- theoretical approaches to waste

- waste ethics

- aesthetics of waste

- waste activism

The two-day conference is organised 12-13 June 2025 in Helsinki, Finland, at the cultural house Kaapelitehdas (an old cable factory building). The conference will combine panels with roundtables, workshops and art events, and we have three keynote speeches (options for online or hybrid participation will not be available, unfortunately).

Our keynote speakers are Prof. Gay Hawkins (Western Sydney University), Prof. Joshua Reno (Binghamton University) and Prof. Steve Woolgar (Linköping University).

Please send your abstract of no more than 250 words and a short bio (max 150 words) by 31 January 2025 to wastemattersconference@tuni.fi.

Registration fee: 120 € (senior scholars); 60 € (PhD students, young artists, scholars from the Global South).