WASTE PLACEMAKING
My doctoral research explored the entanglements between waste and politics of placemaking in Cartagena, Colombia, tracing historical intersections of race, violence and disposability. Through multisited ethnographic work, my research showed how everyday and embodied waste-based experiences shape opportunities of emplacement, care and urban environmental possibilities in the city.
Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic work carried out between 2017 and 2023 in Cartagena, I examine residents’ lived experiences, mundane negotiations and bodily politics with waste shaped by colonial-racial spatial formations, historical inequalities, structures of power and hierarchies of gender, race, and class.
My dissertation combines feminist urban political ecology, Black Geographies, and decolonial Latin American theory to understanding the relational politics of placemaking in and through which urban disposabilities are produced, contested and disrupted in the context of the unfolding climate crisis.
LAURA NEVILLE 