IUR member Kim Roelofs has received a scholarship from the Lars Erik Lundberg Scholarship Foundation for a one-year postdoc project titled Waste Management in Marginalized Areas: Between Individual Responsibility, Symbolic Defamation, and Structural Inequality.
This research studies how housing companies’ waste management initiatives in marginalized areas could contribute to further stigmatization and marginalization of already vulnerable resident groups, by analysing how housing companies mobilize the symbolic category of waste in the context of marginalized areas. Due to the influence of the police’s list of vulnerable areas, initiatives in marginalized areas are increasingly shaped by a concern to increase safety and social order. Initiatives to increase good waste practices are often part of housing companies’ strategies to increase security in marginalized areas, initiatives that aim to get areas removed from the police’s list. The research project focuses on housing companies in Malmö and Gothenburg and investigates how waste management initiatives in marginalized areas can be understood as more than a concern with sustainability by studying the broader context in which these initiatives are embedded. The knowledge produced by this research project can be used to help housing companies and other actors working in marginalized areas to avoid further stigmatizing and marginalizing the residents of these areas.
