Ecology & Politics in Southeasstern Europe: Waste(d) Scapes in Southeast Europe

A dichotomous understanding of nature and culture and romanticising imaginations of a ‘pure’ versus a ‘polluted’ nature remain prevalent in public and political discourses on nature preservation and sustainable transformation. Unveiling (material) ties of waste colonialism in Southeast Europe through the lens of discard studies can foster more informed understandings. By looking at Sisak, Croatia, as an (old) industrial place that is recently being transformed into a place of handling (national) waste streams, I want to discuss why waste streams ‘end’ at certain places and how waste can be understood as a materialization of manifold socio-ecological relations. Danko Simić is university assistant at the Department of Geography and Regional Science at the University of Graz and board member of the Austrian Association of Academic Geography. He is member of the interdisciplinary collective Waste in Motion funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In his research he focuses on commodities, markets and Europeanization processes in Southeast Europe taking a morethan-human perspective