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In this article, we examine the effort of turning biowaste into an asset in the everyday practices of Finnish biogas plants. Drawing from social scientific waste studies as well as new materialist and posthumanist approaches, we approach biowaste as unruly, fluid matter inclined to leak and spill over and capable of affecting the possibilities of valuing it. Our analysis shows how biowaste resists the efforts to turn it into completely homogenous mass; how this mass has to be taken care of over the production process; and how it is not always clear whether the practices produce valuable assets or problematic excess. We argue that to better understand the possibilities for a transition towards a circular economy, it is important to acknowledge that the processing and valuing of waste does not offer complete control over it, but also requires careful alignment with waste material that does not always act as wished. publishedVersion

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosop...

A collection of 84 author's testimonies and workspace photographs between 18 March and 5 May 2020

The paper, based on an ongoing research project conducted in Finland, examines voluntary dumpster diving as a practice of valuation. Its main questions are: How is voluntary dumpster diving intertwined with the question of value? And, conversely, what can dumpster diving teach us about practices of valuation more generally? The article proceeds via three steps. First, in order to emphasize the creative side of dumpster diving as a practice of valuation, we draw on Georg Simmel’s theory of value, supplementing it with the concepts of actuality and virtuality, as elaborated by Gilles Deleuze. Second, we look more closely into the practicalities of valuation evident in dumpster diving. It involves a particular orientation to the urban environment that we call the scavenger gaze. Third, the informants also value the practice itself in relation to its societal relevance. They think about dumpster diving as a way of doing good and as part of an ecologically sound form of life. All in all, as value does not reside inherently in waste or would simply be merely the product of subjective judgment, the analyst must attend to multiple modes of valuation evident in the practice, among which there is no self-evident hierarchy.

The reduction of consumer and retail food waste is crucial for the transition towards a circular economy to take place. Based on an ethnography conducted in a supermarket in Finland, the article examines the hands-on practices of producing and preventing food waste in the retail sector, with a focus on the practices of framing and valuing products. We pay special attention to the process of ridding, which our analysis shows to be integral to selling food products and thus creating value. The findings shed light on how different modes of valuation, both monetary and non-monetary, related to the food products sometimes clash with each other in the everyday operations of the retail business, creating challenges for circular practices. Moreover, the analysis also brings to light how the supermarket practices do not only produce food or waste, but the categories of surplus food are much more varied and subtle. We claim that understanding the multiplicity of these categories, their enactment and mutual relations, and the different modes of valuation related to them is crucial for understanding how and why food waste is generated in the retail sector. Our analysis shows that rather than being only a managerial problem in the context of the circular economy, food waste is always enacted and unmade situationally, through constant hands-on work that also entails leakage and spillover. publishedVersion

While the circular economy invites us to realize the potential of the so-called ‘waste-based commodity frontiers’, reintegration into capitalist value chains is not the only way for discards to be resurrected. In this article, we examine the ways in which the collective of dumpster divers is organized in relation to giving, receiving and reciprocating of various waste-gifts. Our intention is not only to expand existing theorizations of the gift to new domains but also to critically interrogate them, identify their limitations and explore what dumpster diving can teach us about the gift. In particular, the analysis foregrounds the heterogeneity of gift practices. Arguing against universal notions of the gift, the article proposes that waste assumes four main forms of gifts and relations among dumpster divers: givenness (parasitic relation); solidarity-based giving (relation of reciprocity); free giving (asymmetrical relation); and non-giving, as a withdrawal from returning the discards to nature conceived as an Other (the relation of non-relation).

Dumpster diving for food implies using discarded edibles found in waste containers behind supermarkets, for example. People who voluntarily engage in this activity suggest that it is a form of hands-on social critique. In this article, we use interview materials to describe and conceptualize this practice. The main question we pose is: in what way is voluntary dumpster diving a ‘critical practice’? Drawing on the pragmatic sociology of critique, we show how it is a question of an entangled practice in multiple ways: first, dumpster diving is at once a means of contestation and experimentation on the limits of the contemporary form of life and yet simply a way of getting food for free or having fun with friends; second, while being a thoroughly rational endeavour for its practitioners, the activity is simultaneously rife with affect; finally, although dumpster divers are fully aware that they are dependent on the capitalistic form of food supply, the practice allows them to challenge its institutional self-evidences and distance themselves from it. publishedVersion

This article is an imagined dialogue between Weber and Simmel which makes a modest use of some of the resources of theatrical play in order to provide an overall portrait of both thinkers and to bring their thought to bear on our present. The dialogue consists of three acts focused on three central problematics in as many critical moments in Weber and Simmel’s lives: Act I takes place during the preparations for the first conference of the German Sociological Association and thus deals with the constitution of sociology as a socio-cultural science. Act II takes place amid the First World War and its theme is evidently politics. Finally, Act III, where our two characters correspond instead of maintaining a face-to-face dialogue, is situated towards the end of the war and focuses on the attitude to life and indeed to death, as Simmel’s tragic yet admirable death takes place then. A brief introduction explains how we tried to use the possibilities of the dialogical form to expound Weber’s and Simmel’s thought, to compel them to confront their own blind spots and ‘unthoughts’, as well as to explore new ways of teaching the classics and transmitting their thought.

In this experimental text, we reflect in the form of a dyadic teaching diary upon a course we recently taught together on the ‘sociological imagination’. One of the main aims we set for the class was to ponder how the social scientific imagination could be enriched, and figure out ways to stress its social and political relevance. From the pedagogical point of view, we wanted to create a course which would disrupt the students’ oft-criticized routine of rote-learning, and in which they would learn to use digital platforms for the purpose of producing and sharing knowledge, meet each other, and have their social scientific thinking refreshed and perhaps even renewed. In pondering the weeks spent together with our students, we suggest that what gradually happened in our ‘postdigital classroom’ and outside of it was an Event—something surprising and unexpected that could not be controlled entirely.

This article is a multi-authored response to an editorial ‵Postdigital Science and Education′ published in 2018 by Petar Jandrić, Jeremy Knox, Tina Besley, Thomas Ryberg, Juha Suoranta and Sarah Hayes in Educational Philosophy and Theory as a mission statement for the journal Postdigital Science and Education. Nineteen authors were invited to produce their sections, followed by two author-reviewers who examined the article as a whole. Authors’ responses signal the sense of urgency for developing the concept of the postdigital and caution about attempts at simplifying complex relationships between human beings and technology. Whilst the digital indeed seems to become invisible, we simultaneously need to beware of its apparent absence and to avoid over-emphasizing its effects. In this attempt, authors offer a wide range of signposts for future research such as ‘the critical postdigital’ and ‘postdigital reflexivity’; they also warn about the group’s own shortcomings such as the lack of ‘real’ sense of collectivity. They emphasize that postdigital education must remain a common good, discuss its various negative aspects such as smartphone addiction and nomophobia, and exhibit some positive examples of postdigital educational praxis. They discuss various aspects of postdigital identities and point towards the need for a postdigital identity theory. With these varied and nuanced responses, the article opens a wide spectrum of opportunity for the development of postdigital approaches to science and education for the future.

The essay discusses the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel’s theorizing about the individual. Whereas it is typically within the context of the modern metropolis and the mature money economy that Simmel’s ideas have been discussed in the secondary literature, I render those ideas in another light by addressing the ontological and existential issues crucial to his conception of the individual. In Simmel, the individual is divided between the “what” and the “who,” between the qualities which make one something individual and one’s non-repeatable and finite existence which makes one someone singular. I argue that whereas the first dimension can be understood sociologically, in terms of social relations, the latter is not accessible to sociology as such, but must be treated philosophically. Therefore, if we wish to address this duality that lies at the heart of individuality, a “philosophical turn” for sociology is called for.