Garbage and the relational politics of place-making in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

Garbage represents both a universal feature of urban everyday life and a pressing present and future environmental threat. My current doctoral research explores the relation between garbage and the relational politics of place-making. Drawing on ethnographic research in Cartagena, an expanding coastal city in Colombia, I examine the everyday politics and practices of garbage and their relation to the everyday making of the city. I centre on how the everyday, intimate and seemingly mundane practices of dealing with daily household garbage becomes entangled with the daily lives of Cartagena’s inhabitants. In particular, through an intersectional lens, I analyse the ways garbage practices constitute embodied politics of disposability that appear as deeply entangled to the colonial histories and distinct forms of violence that continue to produce and shape Cartagena’s inhabitants’ urban belonging along the lines of race, class and gender.