About the Programme
The Leverhulme Living with Waste Doctoral Programme sets an ambitious, long-term commitment with our community and research partners to tackle the waste crisis.
Our Approach
At the heart of this programme is a commitment to interdisciplinarity designed to problem solve rather than problem-shift. Too often, it is the latter that results in shifting waste burdens in ways that does not address fundamental environmental, social, or technological challenges.
As part of the programme, you will be part of an ambitious research community that is also committed to ensuring that the legacy of research and partnerships started through it continues long after with our partners in the UK and abroad. This is a core value of Queen Mary University of London, and especially the People's Palace Project, who are both supporting this project.
The Waste School and interdisciplinary training environment
You will join a multi-disciplinary cohort of PhD students selected from wide-ranging backgrounds all focussed on framing, understanding and tackling our waste crisis in novel and collaborative ways. For the first three months of your PhD you will join the Waste School - an immersive and interdisciplinary training programme where you will develop skills to analyse waste through different disciplinary lenses and to understand potential connections with e.g., climate change, sustainability, environmental justice and social inequality. All PhD students will receive an intensive foundation in key theories, concepts and methods from across disciplines including ecology and pollution, material and technological solutions, life-cycle assessment, recycling systems, waste economies, climate change, research ethics, and community-engaged, participatory and arts-based research. Training will be delivered by supervisors with contributions from partners across academia, government, industry, policy and civil society and Queen Mary’s network of artists and arts organisations.
The Waste School will run three days per week, and you will spend the remaining two days developing your PhD research proposals and training plans with supervisors. Whilst not all PhD projects will be interdisciplinary, this will provide you with the skills and knowledge to explore how your chosen PhD research interconnects with other disciplines and wider societal or technological challenges while providing opportunities to learn new research approaches and potentially co-develop your PhD with an external partner.
Throughout your 4-year PhD programme you will be involved in student-led activities including organising our annual Living with Waste conference and student-led activities that could include art walks, fieldtrips, industrial site/lab visits, lectures, or performances. We will also develop opportunities for a 3-month knowledge-exchange placement in the penultimate or final year of your PhD study, with e.g., a community or civil society organisation (CSO) or industrial collaborator.
Postdoctoral Research Opportunities ((Tab and link from main page?)
In addition to 4-year PhD funding, Leverhulme have also provided additional funding to support you in your postdoctoral careers. We expect between 10-14 six-month postdoctoral positions will focus on translating research into pedagogical resources, translation and publication of significant and original research and/or creative outputs or developing partnerships. These posts will be allocated on a competitive basis in year four of your PhD study.
What can I study?
Scholars on the Leverhulme Living with Waste Doctoral Programme will be encouraged to think differently and creatively about how we imagine, manage and transform current, future and inherited waste. Wide ranging multi- and interdisciplinary projects focus on understanding waste as a condition of life and interventions that reduce waste production and/or the harm caused by waste on society and the environment while considering ethical, economic, social and technological feasibility.
Topics are advertised both by academic discipline and by theme:
How does waste shape, cultural, social, economic, governance and environmental systems?
Waste is an inevitable and unavoidable condition of the 21st Century and a complex problem we cannot fully solve. This theme explores how the identities, relationships and meanings of waste change through space and time, and how living with waste - its heterogeneity, risks, uncertainties, inequalities and possibilities - shapes future lives, living systems, landscapes, and livelihoods in diverse, novel and unequal ways.
How can we better understand and assess the impacts of waste on the environment and social well-being?
Globally, the lives of millions of people are affected by illegal, unmanaged or poorly managed wastes and our legacy of our industrial growth has left 1000s waste sites across Europe. We currently have poor understanding of the impacts of the impacts of waste on environmental systems and human health and well-being. In this theme you could develop or explore wide-ranging approaches to understand the impacts of waste including novel and low-cost sensors, remotely sensed data or participatory research.
How can we intervene to reduce consumption, waste production and disposal?
In this theme we explore how to understand, change or enable the cultural attitudes, economic and governance frameworks, and technological advances that reduce consumption and disposal. Interventions may be sociological, economic, technological, or environmental.
Reducing the harm of current, future and inherited waste
Given its inevitability we also need to reduce the harm caused by waste once released to the environment. Projects in this theme span technological innovation to considering how colonial pasts, presents, and futures of waste combine with policy legacies.
Re-use and valorisation of waste materials
Waste is a valuable resource and this theme explores how technological and creative innovation and cultural change could create new commerce, industries and/or values for waste materials. For examples millions of people earn livelihoods through waste recovery and recycling, creative reuse (e.g., trash art) and the valorisation of waste materials can help advance a circular economy and engineering can transform waste into inputs for batteries, electrochemical systems and photovoltaics. All these approaches reduce pollution, conserve resources and support a more equitable and resilient future.
What are the inequalities and injustices of waste production and impact?
The global waste crisis is deeply interconnected with climate change and profoundly unequal. Decomposing wastes are a key source of methane, while thousands of legacy landfills are at risk of climate-related hazards. A global minority produce and export waste to countries with weaker or unenforced environmental regulation whilst pollution from waste disposal disproportionately impacts socio-economically deprived populations. The lands and territories of Indigenous peoples have often been burdened with wastes from mining and military activities that compound historical and ongoing injustices. This theme will explore the climate, environmental, social and generational injustice of waste.