Keynotes

Zsuzsa Gille

Professor of Sociology and Director of Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Zsuzsa Gille is Professor of Sociology and Director of Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud: The Politics of Materiality in the European Union (2016 Indiana University Press), From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary, co-editor of Post-Communist Nostalgia with Maria Todorova (Berghahn Press 2010), co-editor of the 2020 The Socialist Good Life: Desire, Development, and Standards of Living in Eastern Europe, and co-author of Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (University of California Press, 2000). She is currently editing the Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies with Joshua Lepawsky.

Hervé Corvellec

Professor of Business Administration at Lund University, Sweden

Hervé Corvellec is Professor of Business Administration at the Department of Service Management and Service Studies, Campus Helsingborg, Lund University. His field of research and teaching is organization behavior, with a focus on infrastructure issues such as performances of public libraries, railroad planning, wind power siting, and risk in public transportation. For the last 15 years, he has been studying the production and management of waste, heading research projects such as From waste management to waste prevention (FORMAS) and Organizing Critical Infrastructure Services – The case of waste management (VINNOVA), and with a critical interest in the circular economy in the past few years. He has published about waste and the circular economy in journals within management (Accounting Organization and Society, Business and Society, Culture and Organizations, Organization, Scandinavian Journal of Management), social anthropology (Journal of Material Culture), geography (Environment and Planning A), environment studies (Journal of Cleaner Production), and engineering (Waste Management, Waste Management & Research). Hervé Corvellec has been associated editor for Waste Management and is a regular guest editor for Detritus.

Gay Hawkins

Gay Hawkins is a professor in social and cultural theory at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University.

Gay Hawkins played a key role in the development of Australian cultural studies as an interdisciplinary and philosophically informed practice of social reflection.

Her distinct research areas are: the relations between culture and governance, environmental humanities, and economic sociology, markets and materiality

Professor Hawkins' work on environments, natures and cultures has been internationally recognised. In 2005 she published The Ethics of Waste, a book examining the materiality of waste and the ways in which it makes ethical claims on us. This book has had a major influence on the development of 'Discard Studies' a vibrant and growing international research field. Between 2008 and 2013 Professor Hawkins worked on a major ARC project investigating the rapid growth of bottled water markets over the last thirty years. This research was published in Plastic Water: the social and material life of bottled water, co-authored with Emily Potter and Kane Race and published by MIT Press in 2015. Over the last ten years she has done a range of related projects investigating the cultural and political history of plastic and its complex remaking of environments, economies and everyday practices.

Gay Hawkins' profile