Professor Mary Douglas’s scientific contributions

... Only through historically grounded practices can waste commons continuously articulate and rearticulate biowaste with other commons, whether pulled together or set apart, enhancing our capacities within the 'biopolitical fabrics of the common experience' (Hardt and Negri 2009, p. 125). Our focus extends beyond classification, valuation, or historical points where quantitative metrics defined and measured waste (Hawkins 2006, Douglas 2013, Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022, which now appear more as wastage outcomes rather than root causes. Instead, we explore how waste commons emerge alongside Hong Kong's historical and contemporary instances of food waste commoning. ...

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Waste commons in motion

... This system also involves a temporary dimension, the future threat looming on culprits if they have so far been spared: 'Where, humanly speaking, the outrage is likely to go unpunished, pollution beliefs tend to be called in to supplement the lack of other sanctions' (ibidem: 133). We see that social structures that define groups and grids (Douglas 2013) frame them by associations and dissociations, causing inclusion or exclusion. Douglas, however, insists on the flexibility and complexity of patterns in modern society, pointing at the transient nature of waste in relation to cultural patterns and symbolic rituals of sorting, an ongoing work of ordering. ...

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People in the Streets of Paris: ‘A Matter Out of Place’?