Encounters: Making Waste Strange

All of us make waste; it is from us and lives with us. But when was the last time you really looked at it?

This workshop is an invitation to slow down and encounter the waste in your own home — not with guilt, but with curiosity.

Drawing on visual methods scholar Dawn Mannay's (2010) operationalization of the concept "making the familiar strange," popularized by C. Wright Mills (1959) we'll use participant-generated photographs to suspend our everyday assumptions and see ordinary materials with fresh eyes.

What this workshop offers:

For graduate students and researchers, this session explores participant-generated photography as a qualitative method — one that accesses dimensions of everyday life that interviews alone cannot reach. Together we a work with this format as a replicable approach to using images as data, strategies for facilitating group analysis, and connections to the broader literature on visual methods.

We'll also explore how critical design practices can extend visual methods beyond analysis into speculation: What happens when we not only photograph waste, but reimagine it? How can acts of making ask new questions of our data? You'll leave with a replicable approach to using images as data, strategies for facilitating group analysis, and an introduction to using creative making as a mode of inquiry.

No prior experience with visual methods or critical design is needed, just curiosity about the materials that surround us.

Please bring:

A photograph (on your phone or printed) of some kind of waste from your daily life, at home or as you walk the streets, something you might usually overlook.

About the facilitator:

I am an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of social justice, environmental sustainability, and the societal implications of emerging technologies. My PhD research combined approaches from critical design, life histories, design archives, and public pedagogy to explore food waste systems—asking what it means to "make the familiar strange" and reveal the hidden stories of everyday materials. This work drew on feminist new materialism to trace the labor, materials, and social relations that disappear once something enters the bin.

As a postdoctoral research associate, I examine how emerging technologies intersect with food systems, waste management, and the climate crisis. With over 15 years of experience advancing gender equity within environmental sustainability, I specialize in translating academic findings into actionable knowledge through workshops, policy briefs, and community-engaged projects. My teaching emphasizes creative problem-solving and critical, multi-layered inquiry. Across all my work, I am driven by the conviction that research should inspire meaningful, tangible change.