Kathleen Stokes

Dublin City University | DCU · School of History and Geography

This report outlines recent political and policy responses to urban vacancy in Ireland, the challenges that these policy objectives face, and lessons that can be drawn from the experience of those who implemented them. It is the second policy output of the Irish Research Council-funded project Rethinking Urban Vacancy, led by Dr Cian O’Callaghan (T...

As the social sciences undergo an infrastructural turn, geographers have taken steps to broaden, disrupt, and reconceptualise understandings of infrastructure and its relationship to social, political, economic, and ecological processes. We contribute to this discussion by highlighting the emergence of a comparatively understudied yet crucial aspec...

Studies of waste work have largely focused on labourers who collect and process materials in exchange for money, including informal waste reclaimers and those now working precariously due to neoliberalization. Researchers have also drawn attention to who sorts waste in and beyond the household. Here we examine voluntary clean-ups as well as waste e...

In Sirr, L (editor) Housing in Ireland: Beyond the Markets, IPA, Dublin, 2021

How waste should flow and who should pay for and benefit from these flows have never been easy questions. Recent efforts to recognize and capture value from (some) waste has led to new flows and new conflicts. In this article, we explore ongoing ideas and initiatives about reworking the wastescape in three South African cities. Various actors seek...

This chapter describes the dynamic institutional, technical, social and political ecological landscape of waste management in South Africa and how this in turn is shaping the practices by which waste is transformed into economic and social value, who is allowed to claim such benefits, and what makes for successful claims. Drawing on urban political...

From the ‘infrastructural age’ to crises of care, infrastructures have taken a paramount place within contemporary discourse and debates. Promises of better futures; the ruination of projects past; increasingly automatised ways of consuming and producing; intensifying socioeconomic inequality and splintering urbanisms – our lives are constantly bei...

For centuries, economic relations in southern Africa were profoundly shaped by interventions that sought to attract and coerce workers to participate in colonial and apartheid economies. These interventions included efforts to change the meaning of labour. Colonial powers sought to instil in colonial subjects a belief that work has worth beyond its...