Littered Bodies of the Urban Wilds: Dis/belonging and an Embodied Praxis of Becoming-with 

Working across the Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies (STaCs), and Art Education departments, this extensive research-practice explores how more-than-human practices of dis/belonging emerge in overlooked, marginal and ‘messy’ urban ecologies - places shaped by waste, displacem, and human-nonhuman entanglement. Based in the urban wilds of Shoreburs in Southampton, my PhD engages with the notion of "littered bodies" - not only as discarded objects, but as figures that rupture order, defy categorisation, and disturb dominant narratives of ecological cleanliness, care, and community.

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My work asks: what happens when we stop treating litter and other ‘undesirables’ as inert or expendable, and instead attend to their agentic, relational capacities in the makings of community, place and worlds? How might these troubling, inconvenient presences reconfigure how we understand community, place, kinship, and ethics in the Capitalocene?

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Grounded in feminist new materialist, posthumanist and post-qualitative thought/practice, this project draws from thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Anna Tsing and Rosi Braidotti. Methodologically, it unfolds through walking, slowness, embodied and sensory inquiry, arts-based documentation, and the cultivation of friction as a generative force. My researcher-body is not positioned as a detached observer, but as a porous, intra-active site of relational encounter - implicated, entangled, and transformed through the research terrain.

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Rather than seeking tidy solutions, this project embraces complexity, contradiction and vulnerability. It works with messiness - of place, method, and 'self' - as a fertile ground for thinking and practicing otherwise.

This work contributes to debates across urban ecology, discard studies, environmental humanities, community development and creative research methodologies by proposing new ways of cohabiting, co-composing and caring with others - human and otherwise - in a contemporary world defined by practices of disposability, rupture and precarity.

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