Unwasting lives
Unwasting lives in fossil modernity
Lead Supervisor: Kasia Mika-Bresolin
Degree Programme: School of the Arts, PhD in Comparative Literature; School of Society and Enviornment, PhD in Geography (to be determined by the supervisory team)
Co-Supervisor:
Kathryn Yusoff (Department of Geography and Environmental Science)
Project Description
In the unequal fossil modernity (Folkers 2021), waste is a condition of life, a verb with multiple tenses, a constellation of temporalities, labour and differentiated injuries; an imaginative and material foreclosure. This interdisciplinary project—environmental humanities and Black and Brown geographies, open to humanities and field-based methods—turns to the many lives and afterlives of fossil fuels (oil, plastic, petrochemicals, climate change) to explore imaginaries, politics and sovereignty in the waste of oil, from Afrodiasporic and/or Indigenous perspectives. These communities, most affected by (petro-)waste, have been leading the struggle for non-extractive environmental sovereignty.
Centering on their experiences and expertise, we ask: How can we re-imagine environmental sovereignty (as set of interconnected conditions), not reducing it to identity politics or state-corporate discourses and regimes of sustainability? In the context of many communities’ wasted lives (extraction as a technology, ontology and epistemology), how can we ‘unwaste lives’? What does it mean to decolonize a set of relationships across these different temporal and geographies, in the waste of oil? How does waste return to the Caribbean and African countries in climate change enhanced weather events?
The project’s focus and rethinking of (petro-)waste—as a constellation, condition and conditionings—will shape socio-technological projects. Ecological crises are not just problems to be solved. They involve cultural representations, values, and creative thinking (Heise 2017) which act as social commentaries, anticipate political action, helping to imagine futures possible in the Wasteocene (Armiero 2021). These occluded perspectives can be translated into shared research questions and design decisions, challenge whose experience becomes legible as wellbeing data, ensuring that socio-technological interventions are transformative, not extractive. To this end, the project turns to cultural objects, narratives (including but not limited to literature, film, visual arts, media), and postcolonial, decolonial and Afro-diasporic/Indigenous philosophies and thought.
Depending on the applicant's project, this can be complemented with on-site interviews and fieldwork or other forms of creative and qualitative research, making sure that the core of the project is firmly anchored in environmental humanities and Black and Brown geographies. Working fluency in languages relevant to the project is strongly encouraged, so is previous experience or connection to potential research sites (but not required).
What we're looking for in a student
Minimum entry requirements for our PhD programmes are:
• a Bachelor's degree (or international equivalent) in a humanities or relevant social sciences subject, with a minimum final degree classification of 2.1 (or international equivalent)
• a Master's degree (or international equivalent) in a humanities or relevant social sciences subject, with a minimum final degree classification of Merit (or international equivalent)
• proof of proficiency in academic English (e.g., minimum IELTS 7.0, with a minimum of 7.0 in writing)
• working fluency in other languages (related to the proposal) is most welcome
• capacity to conduct independent and original interdisciplinary PhD-level research You'll benefit from SSE's and STA's outstanding research facilities (incl.Centre for Creative Collaboration, BLOC Arts Lab and Post Production Suite, and the Graduate Centre) and have access exceptional research and training infrastructures (incl. British Library; Senate House; University of London SAS).
Key words: Afro-diasporic, Indigenous, fossil fuels, imaginaries, sovereignty