Keynote Speakers

Josh Lepawsky

Josh Lepawsky is Professor of Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. He researches the geographies of discards, of maintenance, and of repair.

Questions that inform his research include where and how are contemporary discards made? Where do they travel and where do their effects accumulate? Who gets what discards, where, how, and under what conditions? He is also interested in how maintenance and repair, broadly conceived, might offer both literal and figurative lessons for working out how to live well together in permanently polluted and always-breaking worlds. He is highly published and recent works include “Mapping chemical discardscapes of electronics production”; “Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power” co-authored with Max Liboiron; “Quantifying the Conservation Value of Independent, Place-Based Repair: A Case Study of an Electronics Repair Cluster in Lima, Peru” and Planet of fixers? Mapping the middle grounds of independent and do‐it‐yourself information and communication technology maintenance and repair.

More about Lepawsky’s work can be found at here. Link to vodcast 

Trisia Farrelly

Trisia Farrelly is an Associate Professor at Massey University, New Zealand and joined UNEP’s expert group in 2017 and currently sits on its Scientific Advisory Committee (Marine Litter and Microplastics). Trisia also sits on the Break Free From Plastic Asia Pacific Advisory Committee and Co-Convenes its Policy Working Group. She also provides treaty-related technical support to Pacific Island countries through the Pacific Regional Environment Programme. Her additional roles include Senior Editor of Cambridge Prisms: Plastics and Co-Director of Massey University’s Political Ecology Research Centre. Trisia co-founded the New Zealand Product Stewardship Council and the Aotearoa Plastic Pollution Alliance. Her latest publications include “A binding global agreement to address the life cycle of plastics” published in Science; ‘Plastics pollution as waste colonialism in Te Moananui’; and ‘The Strengths and Weaknesses of Pacific Islands Plastic Pollution Policy’. Link to vodcast

For further details see here.

Manisha Anantharaman

Manisha Anantharaman is an Associate Professor of Justice Community and Leadership at Saint Mary’s College of California and Associate Fellow at Chatham House’s Environment and Society Program. She is a multi-disciplinary scholar whose research and teaching interests connect sustainability and social justice. She applies participatory and ethnographic methodologies to study how economic and political ideologies, socio-cultural identities, and power relations impact how “environmentalism” and “sustainability” are conceptualized and enacted at multiple scales. As a critical scholar, she pays specific attention to how “environmental” initiatives—be it municipal recycling schemes, green space development, or global circular economy transition plans—reinforce or dismantle different manifestations of race, class, gender, and caste-based oppression. Her publications include a co-edited volume “The Circular Economy and the Global South” (Routledge, UK, 2019), and a forthcoming book Recycling Class -The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability”, which examines environmental mobilizations around Bengaluru, India’s garbage crises as a lens into the relational class and caste politics of urban sustainability. You can read more about her research and teaching at manishaanantharaman.com. Link to vodcast.

Patrik Zapata

Patrik Zapata is a Professor in Public Administration at the School of Public Administration, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Patrik Zapata is one of the many waste researchers who are not afraid to physically engage with waste. From accompanying waste pickers at La Chureca from dawn to dusk in their daily toil in dust and heat, to debating waste prevention programs with activists in East Africa, through participating with school children on waste tours at recycling centres in cold and rainy Sweden, he has followed how ideas, plans, reforms, and policies about waste are – or are not – translated into practice. Waste is everywhere in the city, and so is its governance, demonstrated in his publications, among which are Accounting, Organizations and Society; Urban Studies; Cities; Environment and Planning A; Environment and Planning C; Journal of Cleaner Production, Public Administration and Development, Urban Geography. He provides unique insights about how the One bin – One world is organized.

More about Zapata’s work can be found here and also here for the Participatory Innovation videos for inclusive and sustainable waste management.

Blanca Callén Moreu

Blanca Callén Moreu is a lecturer at the University of Vic and the Open University of Catalonia, and a researcher in the area of Social Studies of Science and Technology, design and collective political action. In recent years, she has worked on collective and informal responses to electronic waste in the Spanish context of climate emergency. Her work draws on transdisciplinarity, multi-modal ethnography and critical and ecofeminist thinking. She is co-founder and active member of the Restarters BCN association, dedicated to the promotion of alternatives to planned obsolescence and the cultures of repair for the eco-social and economic transition of Barcelona.