Maya Weeks: Plastic Pollution, Artistic Methods, and Accountability: A Feminist Research Practice

A photo of a hand holding onto a jar filled with plastic off a coast.

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Plastic pollution abounds on the west coast of Sweden, where currents deposit vast quantities of it. This takes place against a background of plastic production at the Borealis plant in the city of Stenungsund. This plant lies some fifty kilometers north of the city of Gothenburg, which was the home of the Swedish East India Company. In this talk, I present a case study in which I trace the plastic nurdles that leak from the transnational Borealis as an extension of corporate power from this major source of Swedish colonization. To do so, I apply a feminist science and technology studies lens that includes creative research methods to recently-conducted scholarship by marine scientists on plastic pollution in the Stenungsund area. Framing this research in the context of journalistic reporting on plastic pollution situates this pollution on a background of Sweden’s imperial history while presenting one mode of possibility for conducting anti-imperial scholarship with creative practice. 
 

About the Speaker
Maya Weeks is a feminist political ecologist, writer, and artist from the rural Central Coast of California. She is a first-generation college student and holds her B.A. in Language Studies (Spanish) from the University of California in Santa Cruz and M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Mills College. She earned her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California in Davis, where she wrote her dissertation on marine pollution as a form of economic violence using both qualitative and creative methods. Recent poetry has been published in Rabbit and recent nonfiction has been published in Zócalo Public Square. A record, Tethers, is out on Full Spectrum Records. She has exhibited at at Vague Research Studios and performed at Historical Materialism. She is an affiliated researcher at the University of California in Davis Feminist Research Institute and teaches at Rutgers University. Maya is grateful to be a guest living and working on Northern Chumash and Salinan land.

 

To learn more about Maya's work, you can listen to this podcast.