Alison Stowell
Senior Lecturer, Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business, Lancaster University
Alison Stowell received her PhD in Organisation, Work and Technology from Lancaster University Management School in 2012. Her route into academia began in the public sector, where witnessing the introduction of the first connected computer systems sparked a curiosity about technology that led her first to a degree and then into the private sector. It was across these fourteen years in the public and private sectors that she began to ask what happens to computers and electronic devices when they are discarded — a question that drew her curiosity towards complex wastes and into the interdisciplinary space between organisation studies, social theory, and science and technology studies. Her research examines how a range of actors — organisations, governments, civil society, communities, and individuals — respond to complex waste challenges and develop solutions. This spans three connected themes: how actors respond to waste policy, how values are negotiated and attributed to waste, and waste as a form of work and occupation. While her research began with electronic waste, it has since expanded to encompass other complex wastes including plastics. More recently she has extended this into a critical examination of the circular economy. Her research has attracted competitive funding from UK and international research councils, and she has led and collaborated/ing on research projects spanning the social, physical, computer sciences and engineering, reflecting the inherently cross-disciplinary nature of waste as a field of inquiry. She has published across management and organisation studies, environmental studies, material science, and sociology, as well as co-authored book chapters and two short books. She is the lead for the Waste and Circular Economy Hub at the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business, Lancaster University, and one of the core leads of Opening the Bin, an international community of social science and humanities waste scholars.