Weathering Waste: Urban Infrastructures and Monsoon Ecologies

This research agenda is led by Climate Postdoctoral Research Fellow Matt Barlow (Ph.D. in Anthropology, 2023, University of Adelaide). Dr. Matt Barlow works on questions related to environment, infrastructure, and waste in urban South India. Through this project, he analyzes efforts to address a waste crisis in Kochi, Kerala, by arguing that understandings of what waste is, and how infrastructures should be designed to manage it, are heavily influenced by environmental imaginaries. Across much of India, both waste and weather are categorized into two qualities: wet and dry. Matt takes these shared qualities as a starting point to investigate the relationship between monsoonal weather and the management of waste in Kochi. 

By placing Kochi’s wet, monsoonal, and coastal ecology at the heart of questions about urban infrastructures in this historic and dynamic city, Matt critiques urban development projects that rely on the production and maintenance of solid ground in an inherently wet environment. If, as one government official recalled, “Kochi is a big house without a toilet”, how does a perceived lack of land and an abundance of water impact not only what can be done about waste, but foundational ideas about what kind of problem waste is to begin with? In asking these questions, Matt also highlights that the infrastructures responsible for filling the ocean and other watery places with the excesses of late liberal consumption, are also the infrastructures largely responsible for anthropogenic climate change. 

This research will culminate in Matt’s first book Weathering Waste to be published with an academic press. In May 2025 he will be hosting a manuscript workshop for the book at CASI with anthropologists Radhika Govindrajan (University of Washington), Amy Zhang (NYU), and Nikhil Anand. This workshop will be jointly supported by both CASI and the Wolf Humanities Centre.