Residual urbanism: rethinking city-making through waste
Funding period: 29 August 2026 – 1 March 2027
Type of funding:
International Fellowship
Maria Raquel Passos Lima is a Brazilian anthropologist, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences of the State University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, where she founded and co-coordinates the research collective ResiduaLab: Laboratory of Social Studies of Waste.
She received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 2015. Resulting from her PhD, the book Trash Inside Out: Materiality, Value, and Visibility (in Portuguese) is an ethnographic account of the waste worlds of informal recyclers at one of the largest waste dumps in South America, located in metropolitan Rio. In her research projects, she works with qualitative methods, focused on ethnographic approaches, combined with audiovisual methodologies. Her latest work, based on urban waters and infrastructures, entitled Águas do Caju, is part of a collective research and documentary film project focused on the port region of Rio, co-coordinated with Mariana Cavalcanti.
Passos Lima’s USF project synthesises over a decade of qualitative research on waste in Rio de Janeiro and advances the concept of residual urbanism to rethink city-making through the lens of waste. It connects historical legacies of waste governance to future possibilities, expanding the temporal and spatial scales of urban analysis to foreground how enduringly toxic matter and more-than-human ecologies co-constitute urban landscapes. Waste as city-maker offers a privileged lens on how a politics of difference is produced and materialized especially in megacities in the Global South.
As a USF International Fellow, Dr Lima will spend six months at the University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research), where she will integrate to the research group at the Centre for Urban Studies, and will work under the mentorship of Prof Rivke Jaffe (Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies).
Profile at Orcid | Profile at Linkedin | Profile at UERJ | maria.raquel.lima@uerj.br