The Birmingham Bin Strike
The Birmingham Bin Strike: Waste Politics in Austerity Britain
Lead Supervisor: Elizabeth Storer
Degree Programme: PhD Geography
Co-Supervisor:
Megan Clinch (Wolfson Institute for Population Health)
Project Description
The ongoing Birmingham bin strike offers an important lens to explore the politics of waste in austerity Britain. The currently unresolved dispute has been experienced in deeply uneven ways across the city, with particularly distressing implications for inner-city communities already facing intersecting crises of housing insecurity, unemployment and marginalisation. The strike reveals waste as more than a material or environmental problem, but a window to understand broader austerity politics: how reductions in public spending and changes to local government reshape the provision of essential urban services and redistribute their costs onto particular communities. In all, this project will contribute to scholarship insisting on the deeply political and contested stakes in human and environmental health. Birmingham offers a crucial case study to explore the impacts of austerity through public provisioning.
Through a grounded case, this PhD will examine the fraught politics which emerge when communities are forced to live with waste in austerity Britain. The PhD project could develop in several interconnected directions, taking questions of sub-contracting, unionisation, distress or community mobilisation as its focal point. Whilst the student will adopt a qualitative approach, research might use ethnographic, creative, media or policy analysis to understand the politicisation of waste and divergent forms of resistance and repair in the wake of this crisis.
The study of the present may also be complimented through historical analysis which explores waste’s fractious pasts and forms of community self-management. The student may also wish to take Birmingham as a comparator site. The supervisory team – Dr Elizabeth Storer (Lecturer, Department of Geography and Environmental Science) and Meghan Clinch (Reader in Anthropology of Public Health, Centre for Public Health & Policy) bring expertise in ethnographic and policy relevant health research. The exact focus of the studentship will be honed during Y1, in conversation between the student and supervisory team. The supervisory team have connections across Birmingham’s inner city, and this PhD could involve partnership with a community organisation, to be determined by the specific focus of the project.
What we're looking for in a student
The potential student may hold undergraduate and/or Masters degrees in Human Geography, Anthropology, Public Policy or aligned disciplines. The student may have experience working in community organising, activism and/or local government. Whilst candidates will be expected to have some experience in conducting qualitative research, they will have an interest in further developing in-depth qualitative approaches. They will receive training from the supervisory team and through the Waste School with respect to developing ethnographically informed and/or participatory methodologies. As a doctoral student, the candidate will be embedded in one of the Department of Geography's Research Themes (likely to be the Health, Environment and Technology, or the Just Worlds Cluster).
Key words: Waste, austerity, subcontracting, resistance, inequality