Important Dates and Information

CALL for PAPERS & REGISTRATION

Submission of abstract, in English (approx. 3000 characters incl. spaces): before March 31, 2025 April 30, 2025

Acceptance decision: April 30, 2025 May 31, 2025

Sending full paper or work-in progress: before September 30, 2025

Registration date: by October 1st, 2025

Late registration date: by November 1st, 2025

Main conference at Le Mans University, France: 10 (2pm) to 13 (1pm) December, 2025

The conference will combine seminars with field visits, sustainability and waste activities.

PANELS

1. Food waste

 Daniel Sosna, Petr Jehlicka & Maike Melles (Czech Academy of Sciences)

We seek unconventional perspectives on Food Waste (FW). These could include food waste’s indeterminacy, its resistance to being classified, measured, and governed. Another might address the changing understanding of FW as surplus, excess, and waste and the implications of the renewed focus on discarding, wasting, and thrift. While wastefulness dominates the literature, less attention is paid to the already existing modes of frugality. We wish to move beyond the debates immersed in dominant languages and driven by the epistemic centre setting the tone for global solutions leaving aside alternatives that do not conform with models assumed to have universal validity.

2. Gendering Waste

 Hervé Corvellec (Lund University ) & Jennie Olofsson (Mid Sweden University)

This panel proposal aims to explore the critical yet often overlooked intersections of gender and waste management. There are differences in the waste that women and men produce. Women and men also tend to play different roles in waste management, for example, in the informal sector or at higher levels of the waste hierarchy. And concepts of waste and its management are underpinned by gendered visions. Heroic masculinity underpins the view that waste can be a resource, or ideals of control over waste echo ideals of control over female leaks such as menstruation. The panel will examine how gendered practices, norms, and power dynamics condition responsibilities, access to resources, decision-making processes, and economic opportunities in relation to waste in all its diverse manifestations.

3. Waste in Africa

PROGRAMME

Wednesday, 10 December

• 14.00-18.00 : PhD/Postgraduate workshop
• 19.00-22.00 : Informal dinner/drinks for early arrivals

Thursday, 11 December

• 09.30-12.00: PhD/Postgraduate workshop
• 13.45-18.30: Welcome to Le Mans University, OTB4, PhD workshop input
• 19.00-21.00: Dinner

Friday, 12 December

• 9.00-12.00: Welcome back, Le Mans University
• 14.00-18.00: OTB4 continues at La Fabrique Rêve de ville
• 19.00-21.00: Dinner