We are delighted to announce that the 2025 Andrew Webster PhD Prize is awarded to:
Dr. Ryan Shum (University of Exeter) for his thesis:
Caring for microplastics: a multi-sited laboratory ethnography
Ryan’s thesis examines the intractable challenge of microplastics in the UK, studying the ontological and epistemological complexities surrounding these synthetic polymers. The AsSIST-UK prize panel appreciated the study’s novel understanding of interactions between the emerging area of microplastics science, policymaking, and publics.
This thesis centred on the issue of microplastics in the UK examines the ontological and epistemological complexities surrounding these synthetic polymers. Microplastics (<5mm in diameter) have emerged as significant matters of concern across public and scientific communities due to their ubiquitous nature and the potential for chronic and transgenerational impacts. This study investigates microplastic entanglements through a multi-sited ethnography that follows these chemical-material traces in and out of scientific spaces. Conducted through a series of semi-structured interviews and ethnographic encounters, the objective of this study is to examine how research scientists generate knowledge about and come to care for microplastics in practice.
In doing so, the thesis aims to challenge dominant ways of understanding and responding to plastic pollution through an analysis centred on the materiality of microplastics. It maps the coming-together of this rapidly growing research community in the UK, scrutinises experimental practices assembled to sense these imperceptible objects, contends with imagined responses to microplastics and explores the uneasy task of managing them across divergent sites, namely, the laboratory and the beach. Throughout, the empirical attention stays close to the practical and ethical challenges faced by research scientists, policymakers, and citizens alike as they find ways of relating with a material that defies technoscientific methods of detection, resists normative solutions imagined to solve issues of waste and pollution and is here to stay into the long future.
The study underscores the need for a situated geographical approach to understanding microplastics that engages with the diverse and often compromised ways scientists attend to microplastics. At this contemporary moment when the question of how to respond to microplastics remains profoundly uncertain, this thesis offers a timely intervention that furthers understanding of the dynamic interactions between microplastic science, policy, and action in the face of this intractable challenge
We would also like to mention the highly commended runners-up:
Daniela Sclavo (University of Cambridge): Culture, Gender, and Flavour in the Conservation of Chile Pepper in Mexico, 1970s-present
Tomas Walker-Borsa (University of Oxford): Future Proof: The Meanings and Makings of ‘The Fibre Project’ on Haida Gwaii
