Waste and Purity
Waste and Purity in the Polar Regions
Lead Supervisors: Jef Huysmans & Joanne Yao
Contact Joanne: Website • Email
Degree Programme: PhD in International Relations (Department of Sociology, Politics and IR)
Project Description
This PhD project invites proposals that explore the tension between waste and purity in the polar regions and how that tension could shape planetary futures. While traditional scholarship on waste centres on valuing waste and its material manifestations, this project focuses on imaginaries of waste and its relationship to purity.
We are interested in research questions on how purity and waste as impurity are conceptualized; methodological work on understanding how imaginaries of purity and waste are produced, understood, and lived; and empirical work on how specific communities in the polar regions navigate the social and political inequalities constituted by dominant imaginaries of purity and waste. For example, polar regions are often imagined as pure, exceptional geographies of science and adventure. How do these imaginaries contribute to social and political structures and inequalities for the human and more-than-human lives that inhabit these regions? In what ways do these imaginaries of purity and/or waste erase histories of colonialism, violence, and injustice? As another example, in 1967, the United States military abandoned Camp Century, a base built into the Greenland ice sheet, leaving behind tons of not only physical waste but radioactive material. How did the ice’s imagined purity and stability contribute to the cavalier way in which toxic materials were left? How does the ice’s mobility through its melt and its flow challenge that imaginary? And what social and political consequences do these imaginaries have for the future of life on a melting world?
These are only a few examples, and we welcome other creative and compelling ways to explore these themes. To deliver this, the project does not necessarily require on-site fieldwork, though we are happy to support fieldwork and discuss the risks and feasibility of such methods. Archival work, discourse analysis, interviews with elite actors or ordinary people, the history of international norms, analysis of policy documents, data analysis, visual methodologies, social media analysis, and other methods are equally valuable for addressing these questions. Through this project, Living with Waste becomes an open question that cuts across interdisciplinary issues that arise from material waste and encourages the development of a critical disposition towards the social, political, and ecological implications of mobilizing the value of purity.
What we're looking for in a student
We are looking for applicants with undergraduate and masters degrees in the social sciences or the humanities (with a preference for first-class degrees/distinction or equivalent). Applicants should have an interest in the politics of Antarctica and/or the Arctic and be interested in questions about the contested imaginaries of waste and purity in these geographies. Applicants should have a strong interest in doing conceptual and theoretical work and engaging in in-depth exploration of the social, political, and cultural processes, and their histories, that shape contentions around waste and purity. We are open to a wide range of methodological approaches and previous training, including but not limited to archival research, discourse analysis, data analysis, fieldwork, elite interviews, and visual and creative methodologies.
Key words: Imaginaries of purity, Politics, Arctic, Antarctica, Inequalities