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Short abstract:

The paper will develop ubiquity as a conceptual lens to describe the aesthetic, practical, and material politics of plastic pollution and cleaning. It will draw on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Ahmedabad, India, building on waste-picking apprenticeship as an embodied method.

Long abstract:

The paper will develop ubiquity as a conceptual lens to describe the aesthetic, practical, and material politics of plastic pollution and cleaning. It will draw on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Ahmedabad, India and will build on waste-picking apprenticeship as an embodied method of spatio-material enquiry and knowledge production. The fieldwork is situated at a time of neoliberal reforms in solid waste management under Prime Minister Modi’s ‘Clean India’ mission. Accompanying Dalit women entrepreneurs who set out on foot in the wee hours of morning, walking opportunistically to pick recyclable plastic discards, the paper will criss-cross different roads, neighbourhoods, class and caste demographics, practices of consumption, discarding, cleaning, tracing altering geographies of plastic waste. These trajectories encounter competition from private waste companies, public policing, entrepreneurial and solidarity networks – ranging between the formal and the informal.

As such, the empirical material brings together different economic and social aspirations, interests, needs, affordances practical improvisation, and innovation at a time of reforms. These conflict and align, unravelling society and cleanliness politics along the lines of class, caste, gender, and so on. In the process, I will both address how the ubiquity of plastic waste is enacted as part of situated social, cultural, economic, spatial, and infrastructural relations, and the different kinds of inventive practices and politics that it leads to.