2025/10/14 by Sebastián Carenzo · 3 voices · 1 citation
Environmental Science · #Municipal Solid Waste Management
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/25729861.2025.2539618
openalex created_date 2025/10/14 · openalex publication_date 2025/10/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Since 2004, we have been implementing collaborative research workshops to analyze the organization of a waste picker´s cooperative and its working process. Accompanying their techno-productive trajectory, the workshops currently focus on the configuration of a space for experimentation on recyclable materials that face technical and/or economic restrictions in order to be recycled. This experimental practice enables repertoires of skills and knowledge based on the correspondence between the physicality of discarded materials, the body, and the sensorimotor register. This expertise is not organized according to the supports, procedures, and bureaucracies corresponding to the “normal” Science and Technology model; thus, its legitimacy is often put into question. The implementation of an “open laboratory” methodological device in the cooperative’s shed has allowed us to collaboratively analyze and systematize these experimental practices, contributing to their subsequent legitimization. However, it is a “pop up” experimental infrastructure, which acquires a diffuse existence, as it is not permanent but “activated” in certain circumstances. Based on an ethnography that recovers contributions from the socio-technical perspective and the critique of the linear model of innovation, I analyze the experience of the “open laboratory,” highlighting the way in which this device contributes to the political activation of the technical expertise developed by precarious sectors that (apparently) lack the economic, educational, and cultural capital that would allow them to accredit these competences.