Keynote Speakers

Rosalind Fredericks

Rosalind Fredericks is an Associate Professor of Geography and Development Studies at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.  Fredericks's research and teaching interests are centered on development, urbanism, and political ecology in Africa. As an urban geographer, her research brings together discard studies, critical infrastructure studies, and feminist political ecology in examining the politics of waste work and discard infrastructures in Dakar, Senegal. Her book, Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018), was awarded the Toyin Falola Book Award for the best book in African Studies by the Association of Global South Studies. Her current research project, supported by a major grant from the National Science Foundation, examines the lifeworlds that hang in the balance with the transformation of Dakar’s dump, Mbeubeuss.  This research is the basis of her book manuscript, tentatively titled Refuse(al), and her recently released documentary film, The Waste Commons, in collaboration with Alchemy Films.  After completing her PhD in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, Fredericks was a postdoctoral research scholar with the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. Fredericks edited two books with Mamadou Diouf on citizenship in African cities: Les arts de la citoyenneté au Sénégal: Espaces contestés et civilités urbaines (Editions Karthala, 2013) and The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities: Infrastructures and Spaces of Belonging (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) as well as The Politics of Disposability: Discard Studies in an Era of Devaluation with Mohammed Rafi Arefin (exp. 2025). Fredericks is the co-director (with Robin Nagle) of the Discard Studies Collaborative at NYU and co-organizer of the Discard Studies Conference held at Gallatin in September 2022 and the Discard Studies Film Festival in April 2024. She is serving as an NYU Center for the Humanities Fellow for 2024-2025.

Mary Lawhon

 Mary Lawhon is Professor of Political Ecology at the University of Edinburgh. She is interested in what waste tells us about broader understandings of justice and sustainability. Her early scholarship focused on conflict between actors over how to improve recycling, showing multiple answers to the questions of ‘what should be done’ and ‘what sustainability might look like’. These different versions of what improved recycling infrastructure might entail were deeply entangled with questions about who would decide, who had power, and who would benefit from new material flows.  
After having two children, Mary decided to take advantage of a newfound (relative) comfort with poop (both talking about and handling it), and brings insights from waste studies into research on sanitation infrastructure. Across waste and sanitation infrastructures, Mary is interested in what kinds of technology people imagine to be good, what kinds of labour are seen as (un)important/(un)avoidable, how much ‘nature’ is seen to be understandable and controllable, and the connections between universality, justice and difference.  Her writing links empirical studies of waste and sanitation to wider debates about how people understand the world, connecting infrastructural technologies, policies and practices to wider debates around the politics of knowledge, what ‘sustainability’ is, and what a good urban future entails. She is invested in thinking from and with the global south, and why this pushes us to rethink explanations of both what is, and what we think ought to be.
Most recently, Mary’s writing advances thinking about a ‘modest imaginary’-- a way of understanding the world beyond the long-established and rather stale modern/arcadian binary-- as an approach to building a better world amid social and ecological uncertainty. Her most recent book (co-authored with Tyler McCreary) is Enough! A Modest Political Ecology for an Uncertain Future and she is currently working on a co-authored book analysing the imaginaries behind prominent environmental solutions. More about Mary’s work can be found at https://marylawhon.com 

Baptiste Monsaingeon

Lecturer at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, researcher at the CRIEG-REGARDS laboratory, on delegation to the ESO laboratory (CNRS), Baptiste Monsaingeon studies the place of waste, particularly plastics, in our societies.
In 2009, he embarked for a year to analyze the agglomeration of plastics in the North Atlantic, a founding experience which gave rise to the publication of Homo detritus, critique of the waste society, published by Editions du Seuil (2017). He then contributed to the exhibition 'Vie d'Ordures' at the Mucem (2014) and to 'Throwaway, The history of a modern crisis' at the Maison de the history of the European Parliament (2023-2024). Since 2022, he has co-led CNRS/INRAE expertise on plastics in agriculture and food.
Winner of the CNRS bronze medal in 2024, he now analyzes the social and technical trajectories of plastics and their invasive presence, at the limits of sustainability.

Maria Jose Zapata Campos

 María José Zapata Campos is an Associate Professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg and Research Director at the Swedish International Centre for Local Democracy. Her research, conducted collectively with an inter- and transdisciplinary team and from a waste-activism perspective, explores the organizing of grassroots initiatives for sustainability, particularly at the intersections of waste and climate governance in cities. From Managua’s dump site to informal settlements in Kisumu, Kenya, from coastal plastic pollution in Mombasa to circular grassroots initiatives in Sweden, María José has examined how community-led innovations contribute to just transitions. Her work highlights how grassroots challenge dominant systems, help us reimagine waste and democracy, and build alternative infrastructures of care in post-growth cities.