Staying With the Waste: Litter, Learning and Slow Violence in Wasted‐Edgelands
Ria Dunkley & Kirsten Somerville
What the paper says
Post‐industrial landscapes, often dismissed as wastelands, are increasingly recognised as important sites for rethinking environmental education. This paper conceptualises wasted‐edgelands, landscapes shaped by industrial legacies and capitalist disposability, as pedagogical sites that work on children's attention, ethics and relations, rather than as spaces requiring repair or restoration. Drawing on a 10‐week John Muir Award project with primary school children in a working‐class Scottish community, it examines how children encounter waste as a pedagogical force. Grounded in scholarship on slow violence, ecological entanglement and more‐than‐human relations, the paper reframes litter picking not as stewardship or environmental action, but as sustained attentiveness to waste's persistence. Children's engagements foreground ethical witnessing, speculation and relational thinking, emphasising endurance rather than erasure. The Wasted‐Edgelands Learning Labyrinth conceptualises learning as recursive and non‐linear, privileging return, uncertainty and lingering over behaviour change. The paper contributes to radical geographical debates on environmental justice, disposability and pedagogy in damaged landscapes.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.