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This paper examines the competing knowledge-practices in a limestone region in Cambodia. It argues that attending to varied ethical practices through which circularity is enacted open new ways to understand the disturbing alliance between extractivism and environmental care.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a limestone region of Kampot, Cambodia, this paper explores how knowledge-practices of extraction and conservation—both of which invoke the logic of circularity—are enacted on the ground. As a key ingredient in cement production, limestone has long been mined to support infrastructure-making. Recently, cement companies across the world have increasingly adopted principles of the circular economy, collecting waste materials as alternative fuels for limestone kilns in the name of sustainability. Cambodia is no exception.

Using a cement factory as a case study, this paper demonstrates how the notion of circularity props up a particular form of environmental care (e.g. waste reduction) whilst simultaneously perpetuating another form of environmental destruction (e.g. limestone extraction). Yet beyond its value as construction material, the limestone landscape also sustains diverse wildlife, particularly bats, whose guano provides an important source of livelihood for local villagers. Appealing to the notion of circularity, community-based conservation initiatives have sought to regenerate the landscape and bat populations.

By delving into the entanglements between extractivism and conservation, this paper illustrates how circularity becomes multiple on the ground, taking shape through diverse ethical orientations. Whereas the association between circularity and extractivism is often criticised as “greenwashing”, such a narrative may not fully encapsulate how competing realities—of care and/of exploitation—are held to be true. Attending to varied ethical practices through which circularity is enacted, I suggest, may open up new ways of understanding the unsettling alliance between extractivism and environmental care.

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This paper examines circularity as relational achievement rather than material property. Drawing on interviews with small organisations, it explores the everyday labour, care, and ethical judgments required to sustain circular networks, and asks when circular systems become difficult to live with.

Paper long abstract

Circular economy initiatives are often conceptualised as properties of materials: products designed for disassembly, resources travelling in loops through reuse, repair, and recycling. This paper shifts the analytical focus from materials to relations, drawing on qualitative interview data from a network-mapping exercise with small organisations participating in a local circular-economy exchange in Scotland. Rather than treating circularity as a technical achievement of objects, the paper explores how it is enacted as an ongoing relational accomplishment that is maintained through everyday organisational labour, coordination, and care.

The ethnography foregrounds the often-invisible work required to sustain circular exchanges: negotiating mismatched capacities, absorbing inefficiencies, translating circular ideals into accounting practices, and maintaining trust across uneven organisational landscapes. Circularity emerges as something fragile, contingent, and frequently exhausting. Ethical concerns surface less in explicit moral discourse than in practical judgments about whom to prioritise, what burdens are tolerable, and when participation becomes difficult to live with.

By reframing circularity as a property of socio-technical networks rather than materials alone, the paper reconsiders how labour, systems, and measurement are implicated in circular-economy projects. It suggests that dominant metrics (e.g. CEMIF) risk rendering relational work invisible, while data infrastructures themselves shape the ethical conditions under which circularity can be sustained. The paper contributes to debates on the ethics of circularity by offering a situated account of how value, waste, and care are negotiated in practice, and by questioning what it means to design circular systems that organisations can actually inhabit over time.

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This presentation examines the multi-faceted ethical dimensions of employers offloading their unwanted household items onto domestic workers in Singapore, and how this may inadvertently contribute to waste colonialism.

Paper long abstract

The export of reusable or recyclable waste to lower-income countries in the name of closing material circularity loops has been increasingly recognised as a form of environmental racism and waste colonialism. What is less visible and more ethically ambiguous is the phenomenon whereby foreign domestic workers send unwanted reusable household items amassed from their employers back to their home countries in Balikbayan boxes. On the one hand, the life-spans of the items in Balikbayan boxes are extended and they serve as a resource to the domestic worker’s family. On the other hand, this offshoring of reusable items do not just support circular transitions, they also displace environmental responsibilities (e.g. reuse, eventual disposal) and risks (e.g. improper disposal) elsewhere. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with migrant domestic workers and their (more affluent) employers in Singapore, this presentation explores the complex ethical dimensions around the offloading circular waste management onto domestic workers across space and time. For instance, there is a tendency for Singaporean employers to perceive themselves as environmentally virtuous while being ethically blind to the possibility that their donation of unwanted items to their workers may be tantamount to waste colonialism. Such an ethical emphasis shifts the evaluation of circular practices beyond technical metrics (e.g. product life extension, material recovery, financial gains) towards the ways in which they redistribute social and environmental burdens unevenly. Overall, the paper advances the scholarship on just circular transitions by highlighting the transnational labour relations and regional inequalities through which circularity is sustained.

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This paper compares waste circulation in public and domestic spaces in Siliguri, India, showing how circularity depends on unacknowledged ethical work: workers absorb bodily risk while households manage timing and concealment. Together they show circularity's limits when care is out of sync.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how ethical labour emerges not within smooth circuits of reuse and recovery, but at moments where circularity falters, slows, or must be forcibly sustained. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Siliguri, eastern India, I juxtapose two sites often treated separately: the public world of streets, carts, animals, and dumping grounds, and the private interiors of middle-class homes. Together, these sites reveal how circularity depends on forms of ethical work unacknowledged within dominant circular economy imaginaries.

In the public domain, waste circulates through misaligned infrastructures and delayed governance, sustained by precarious sanitation workers' bodily labour and multispecies exposure. Circulation here is less closed loop than coercive demand: workers absorb risk, injury, and waiting to keep waste moving absent reliable systems. Within domestic interiors, waste rarely circulates freely. It is wrapped, hidden, stored, and delayed until the 'right' disposal moment. Menstrual waste, sacred residues, and everyday refuse are managed through careful timing and concealment, enacting ethical judgements prioritising dignity, privacy, and moral order over efficiency.

Placing these sites in dialogue, the paper argues that ethics emerge at circularity's thresholds—where care arrives too early, too late, or must be improvised amid unsynchronised infrastructures. Circularity, as imagined in policy, externalises its ethical costs onto households and workers, who quietly absorb the temporal and moral labour preventing waste from overwhelming everyday life. Attending ethnographically to waiting, delay, and bodily absorption allows us to rethink circulation's ethics beyond techno-moral solutions.

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This paper examines the ethical dimensions of circulating real-estate investments in Vietnam’s urban centers, asking how this widespread form of short-term speculative investment contributes to inflated property price and, ultimately, to the country’s ongoing housing crisis.

Paper long abstract

Housing affordability in Vietnam has become a critical issue, as real-estate prices far exceed the average income of most Vietnamese. This paradox emerges alongside the rapid expansion of housing development plans across urban centers. A large proportion of buyers are not purchasing homes to live in them, but rather as assets to flip for profit. More than 75 percent of homebuyers are acquiring their second property or more, treating real estate as an investment. Buying-off-the-plan is common. Buyers purchase units while they are still under construction and resell the purchase contracts at a profit. By the time the construction is completed, these properties have been traded multiple times as forms of “promised materiality” circulating through payment process. Every transfer raises the price, contributing to inflation in housing costs – a practice widely known in Vietnam as real estate “surfing”.

Vietnam’s new urban developmental plans thus become gold mines for short-term speculative investors who increase their capital through property transactions. Meanwhile, the resulting price inflation renders housing increasingly unaffordable for those seeking homes to live in, making Vietnam one of the least affordable real-estate markets in the world, marked by stark inequalities in access to housing.

This paper explains how wealth circulates and becomes inflated within housing development plans. Drawing on ethnographic research, it brings together the perspectives of real-estate developers, agents and brokers, homebuyers, speculative investors, and people struggling to buy a home. The paper examines the ethical implications of this phenomenon, and sheds light on Vietnam’s housing crisis.

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Following end-of-life lithium batteries in Norway's electromobility boom, this fragmented ethnography shows the diversity of social-ecological-material relations of lithium recycling. Analysing industrial circular imaginations as 'supraterranean', it argues for more messy, grounded battery stories.

Paper long abstract

1. At the reception of the electric car repair workshop, between several framed certificates for high-voltage battery work and an impressionistic painting of a Tesla car, I shake hands with one of the mechanical engineers. I spot a battery tattoo on his wrist.

2. In a historically steel-producing town, I eat a kanellknute with an employee of the prospected lithium battery gigafactory that is supposed to transform this place into green industrial capital. I ask her about industrially recycling metals from batteries. She is hopeful: 'batteries are the new oil for Norway' - a green alternative source of wealth.

3. In the university laboratory, a chemical engineer water-filters shredded battery mass, aiming for sustainable ways to recover lithium. He explains recycling suffers under fast-changing battery designs, worries that labelling recycled batteries 'green' will legitimise overconsumption, and shares concerns about the geographical politics of battery recycling job opportunities.

4. In a nature reserve in a southern fjord and estuary, the tensions between circular industrial area and ecological restoration site can be felt. Birds, noise, wind and waste ignore the border intended to separate both. Notions of circularity, borrowed from natural cycles and ecosystems, are seeping into green company imaginaries, while old chemicals start to leak into the nature reserve as industrial expansion takes new shapes.

Following end-of-life lithium batteries in Norway's electromobility boom, this fragmented ethnography tells of the diversity of social-ecological-material relations of lithium recycling. Regarding the industrial circular imagination as supraterranean, it argues for more messy, grounded battery stories.

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This presentation focuses on DIY repair and reuse practices in Estonian homes and their historicity in relation to the Soviet ‘repair society’, viewing them as an emerging form of cultural heritage and as a culturally informed ‘ethics of circularity’.

Paper long abstract

Ethnographic studies indicate that DIY repair and reuse remain viable practices in the Western world, extending beyond the common circular economy model. This presentation focuses on DIY repair and reuse practices in Estonian homes and their relationship to the Soviet past and the contemporary climate crisis. This research draws on a collection of repair and reuse stories collected by the Estonian National Museum, as well as the author`s ethnographic fieldwork.

Repair and reuse in the post-Soviet context reflect specific historicity and cultural meanings shaped by the Soviet past and its consumer culture. The Soviet economic and social context has been described as a ‘repair society’, where traditional consumption practices, such as repair, reuse, repurposing and a DIY mentality, persisted due to economic necessity. Repair and reuse practices have remained vivid in Estonian cultural memory. Moreover, for generations born and raised during the Soviet era, these practices are a lived experience and remain common consumption practices.

In the discourse of ‘repair society’, repair and reuse are often portrayed positively as normative and sustainable forms of usership, contrasting with contemporary consumerism and reflecting concern about the climate crisis. Repair is also valued as a craft skill with potential for ecological sustainability. Within the recently emerged repair movement in Estonia, the younger generation of activists, as well as craftspersons and designers, aim to relearn and reintroduce mending techniques to the public. Repair is becoming a form of cultural heritage and a culturally informed ‘ethics of circularity’.

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Drawing on ethnographic research in low-end antique markets, this paper examines how objects are reconfigured through material, narrative, and infrastructural care, showing how ethics of circularity emerge in practice through everyday care relationships.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how ethics of circularity are enacted and negotiated within low-end antique markets, drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork and 19 interviews with dealers in Brussels, Paris, Milan, Amsterdam, and London. Focusing on objects deemed broken, obsolete, or of marginal value, the paper conceptualises abandonment as an in-between condition through which materials reconfigure. Rather than approaching circularity as a techno-economic solution to waste, I discuss how the market assemblage of human and non-human actors generates three distinct regimes of care through which objects’ temporal lives are reshaped and extended: material, narrative, and infrastructural care. Material care consists of selective repair that secures ongoing viability. Narrative care preserves and reinterprets fragmentary biographies, enabling micro-histories to circulate and fostering new imaginative futures. Infrastructural care involves maintaining the relational and organisational systems—routines, display arrangements, and expert networks—that render objects legible and mobile. Together, these practices reveal an ambivalent ethics of circularity, where care emerges not as a stable moral orientation but as a negotiated process shaped by interactions of a heterogeneous constellation of actants. In this sense, low-end antiques function as what DeSilvey (2017) terms “material provocations,” exposing how circularity is locally reworked through contingent relations between humans and nonhumans. By foregrounding the processes of reconstitution after abandonment in the second-hand market for low-end antiques, the paper shows how ethics of circularity are produced in practice through everyday care relationships.