Walking with plastic waste: resonant practices for working with presence-as-absence

Abstract

Plastic waste in cities creates a paradox: it is everywhere in daily life yet often escapes notice. While previous studies have highlighted plastic’s persistence and visibility as pollution, less attention has been given to its subtle, everyday disappearances in Nordic urban settings. This article develops resonant practices for studying this contradiction. Resonant practices emerged from walking-with plastic waste, extending attention to urban atmospheres in Turku, Finland. These practices focus on subtle signals such as flicker, tang, shimmer, or silence, and documents them as vignettes, composed through writing, drawing, photography, video, and sound recording. I argue that these practices make the hidden presence of plastic workable for research. The research is made possible by treating small atmospheric and bodily traces as evidence, especially when they recur across senses and connect to urban systems that organize disappearance. Examples from fieldwork show how plastic becomes affectively present in ordinary spaces and how careful use of measurement can connect with sensory noticing. Resonant practices condense into what I name as the microplastic gaze: an embodied attentiveness to cultivated absences of plastics that extends fieldwork toward situated resonance. The article concludes by emphasising the importance of methodological approaches, remaining attentive to forms of loss, disappearance, and attenuation, and offering new ways to document the elusive materialities of urban plastic waste.