Garbage Borderlands of Sustainable Transformation and Collective Future Making

Over the past one and a half years we have been educating our citizen selves to move with and co-create, in research, sustainable garbage recycling transitioning. We are inventing methods and reoccurring rarely used Follettian and Anzaldúian methods, responding to and evolving a societal situation at hand; citizens and garbage workers adopting (or not) and engaging creatively new sustainability practices.<br/>Our method to become grand challengers (O’Connor, 2024), preparing ourselves in ways unconventional even for participatory action research (PAR) (Bradbury, 2004; 2021), has been to explore engagement from the position of ourselves as citizens. Drawing on process onto-epistemology, feminist theorizing, and the axiological (Bell, 2025; Gümüsay &amp; Reinecke, 2024), taking inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa (2012) in empathic preparation to our upcoming PAR engagements, we leaned into becoming the phenomenon ourselves (Müller, 2018; Revsbæk<br/>&amp; Beavan, 2025). Sensing what would be/could be needed (of development/method/response) to evolve the situation at hand, entails risks of alienation, shame, withdrawal, etc. From everyday occurrences of taking out the trash we wrote into the difficult Borderland experiences (Anzaldúa, 2012).<br/>In the unfolding of our research process our interest is now moving towards gathering citizens of the communities together (Follett, 1918). Building on neighbourhood stories of humor, empathy, co-policing and conflict between street citizens sharing implementation experiences from the bins, we seek to investigate the citizen travelling and transforming during large-scale sustainability implementation as a site for developing collective desirable futures (Bell, 2025; Gümusay &amp; Reinecke, 2024).<br/>Our interest is turning towards the sanitation workers who perform the hidden, degrading and smelly work of picking up citizen garbage. Discovering the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Artist in Residence and the New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY) (1977–to date) and her concept of Maintenance Art (Helin, Kivinen &amp; Pullen, 2021), where she seeks to make maintenance workers and the work they do visible we are looking to bring forward her work into a PAR with recycling workers in Denmark. Bridging feminism, environmentalism, and participatory art practice (PAP) Ukeles has had many performance art projects over the course of her multi decade tenure as embedded artist which we might reenact or adapt. In particular we have been touched by her project “Touch Sanitation” (1979-80) in which she faced, thanked and shook the hand of every member of DSNY’s workforce over the course of eleven months (Philips, 1996, p.98). We hope to explore both these new directions in roundtables at the workshop (PDW).