Call for papers for an ephemera special issue - Organizing wasteland
Issue editors: Charlotte Cator, Christina Juhlin, Birke Otto and Justine Grønbæk Pors
This special issue explores wasteland as a socio-spatial process creating relations of discarding, (de)valorizing and (dis)organizing spaces, people and objects. We invite contributions that theorize wasteland as hopeful alternative as well as those that critically observe the manifold instances in which spaces, people and objects are made redundant. The issue approaches wasteland as an occasion to rethink the organization of spaces wasted by the existing order and learn from the things, people, times and practices the existing order expels.
Wasteland is commonly associated with disorder, the absence of organization and abandonment. It is shaped through intentional designations of things to be shunned (Edensor, 2005) in order to ‘organise the environment’ (Douglas, 1966: 2). Designating a space as wasteland is bound up with capitalist processes and power relations, enacted through everyday practices (McClintock and Morris, 2024). As such, wasteland is part of capitalist production and consumption – it is its unwanted but inevitable flip side. Although often invisible, waste circles back to us in uncanny loops, for example through slowly degrading nuclear waste sites,through microplastics that creep into human, animal and environmental bodies and in outer space, where the Earth’s orbit has become an irreversible wasteland (Doeland, 2020).
Yet, wasteland is more than merely the flip side of capitalism; its disorder, abandonment and nothingness carry the promise of capitalism’s absence and the possibility to explore alternatives to it. Zones of nothingness are always ‘a set of specific processes, resistances, imaginaries, images, dreams but also designs’ (Krivy et al., 2011: 243). Human intentionality is at the basis of not only the existence and preservation of wasteland, but also its transformation – and thus alternative futures. It is from the piles of rubble in Gaza that post-colonial utopian imaginarie scan be forged (El Bagoury, 2024), while the post-apocalyptic melancholy called forth by Chernobyl’s nuclear wasteland is a required element in reimagining ‘another end of the world’ (Horvat, 2021: 35).
Such rethinking of wasteland under the direst circumstances sparks an engagement with the promises of a space that is not (yet/any more) incorporated into the structuring order that it breaks with. This promise can be temporary, fleeting and insurgent, as for example, in the form of squatters and alternative forms of self-organizing that take place at the margins of gentrifying cities (Beveridge et al., 2022; Schipstal and Nicholls, 2014). These forms of organizing might also last longer, as wasteland allows for the imagination of alternative forms of life in an unstable world (Beau et al., 2021), ecological and community restoration in the ruins of extractivist practices (Beckett, 2018) and a richer public realm through urban biodiversity in overlooked spaces (Gandy, 2013).
Wasteland calls our attention not just to the formal sites of social and political organization, such as offices,streets, buildings, neighborhoods. It also draws our attention to the places that are hidden away in an attempt to purify spaces and organizational processes. These include physical production sites and archives (Humphrey and Hirst, 2013), wastelands (near and far) resulting from deindustrialization and offshoring (Contractor et al., 2010) and the material politics of obscuring lingering residues and toxics (Balayannis, 2020). They also include more intangible practices, such as the open secrets that create loopholes and hiding spaces for illicit action (Backsell, 2025; Otto et al., 2019), or organize subversive forms of knowledge production (Vogelgsang et al., 2024). As previous debates in ephemera have shown, an exploration of such places and practices scrutinizes the ambiguous, multifaceted and contentious organizational processes through which spaces, objects, people, discourses and practices are disposed (Pors et al., 2019), ignored (Knudsen et al., 2023), put on standby (Kemmer et al., 2021), repaired (Trogal and Graziano, 2019) and potentially ‘saved’ (Bialski et al., 2015). These studies underline, following organization studies’ spatial turn (Dale et al., 2018; Beyes and Beyes, 2020), that wasteland is part of the social production of space.
Telling the stories of wasteland requires methodological caution. Persisting forms of waste colonialism (Liboiron,2021) blatantly point to the global unevenness of processes of wasting. Given the potentially severe damages wasteland causes in places where there is literally no alternative, it should not be reduced to a romantic promise. Feminist methodologies remind us that naming and identifying objects of study always involve the risk of reproducing our mechanisms for seeing (Haraway, 1988) and thus of fixating wasteland as either disorder or hopeful alternative. While careful thinking about the position from which wasteland is named and analyzed is important, wasteland’s many configurations – the damages and the ways in which wasteland can spark new imaginaries and practices – invite many entry points of analysis. Possible topics that this special issue invites for include, but are not limited to, the following:
•Material politics of the (un)making of wasteland
•Empirical explorations of the interrelations between institutions, social orders and wasteland
•Wasteland as a promise of hope and alternative futures
•Alternative modes of organizing wasteland (e.g. autonomous forms of living, land reclamation and ecological restoration)
•Wasteland and time: wasteland as temporal residue (archives, ‘outdated’ practices and objects, the politics of time)
•Wasteland and emotional loss: spaces of debris, mourning and post-colonial and post-war reparation
•Wasteland and the study of relations between places (e.g., global/local and rural/urban interdependencies, infrastructures)
•Wasteland, more-than-human life and biodiversity
•Wasteland and commodification (e.g. temporary urbanism, circular economy)
•The forms of labour enabling the (un)making of wasteland (e.g., informal and voluntary labour, practices of care)
•Wasteland as a contentious and ambiguous category, or even metaphor
•Critical, feminist, socio-spatial methodologies for studying and analyzing wasteland (e.g., topology, prefiguration)
Deadline for submissions: 31 October 2025. All contributions should be submitted to the issue editors: Charlotte Cator (cc.bhl@cbs.dk),Christina Juhlin (cj.bhl@cbs.dk), Birke Otto (bo.bhl@cbs.dk) and Justine Grønbæk Pors (jgp.bhl@cbs.dk).The following categories of contributions are invited for the special issue: articles, notes, reviews, interviews and other media. Submissions should follow ephemera’s submission guidelines (www.ephemerajournal.org/how-submit). Articles will undergo a double-blind review process. Please do not hesitate to contact one of the issue editors with any queries you may have, or to propose a note or review contribution.
There will be an interactive panel introducing the special issue and exploring the topic of organizing wasteland during the Annual International Conference of the Royal Geography Society (with IBG), taking place at the University of Birmingham from Tuesday 26 August to Friday 29 August 2025. It may be possible to attend the panel virtually. If you would like more information about this panel, please get in touch with Charlotte Cator (cc.bhl@cbs.dk) or Christina Juhlin (cj.bhl@cbs.dk).