Circular Researching - Why I Followed Trash Around Phnom Penh (and What It Taught Me About the City)

On Sept, 11 I gave a talk on "Circular researching. A method to make sense of the sociomateriality of the urban fabric". The keynote was in the framework of the workshop "Repurposing Phnom Penh: Built Forms and Infrastructure as Archive" by Dr. Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier at the Center for Khmer Studies in Phnom Penh.

My contribution was something I call circular researching—a method I developed through years of work in Cambodia’s vibrant, complex recycling economy.

What’s in a Pile of Plastic?

When I first arrived in Phnom Penh, I was struck by something that others often overlooked: waste. Or more specifically, the people who move through the city collecting it—recyclers known as Ed Jai. They don’t just gather trash; they circulate. They move back and forth through neighborhoods, creating pathways, rhythms, and unexpected patterns in the city’s fabric.

This circulation became the starting point for my research. What if I followed the same paths—not just physically, but also through time, through history, and through layers of meaning? That’s how “circular researching” was born.

More Than Just History—It's an Archive of Practices

Urban spaces aren’t static. A crumbling building, a cluttered street, a forgotten landfill—they all tell stories. But instead of thinking of the city as a museum or archive of things, I wanted to see it as a living archive of practices. How people move, repurpose, imagine, and organize the materials around them says as much about their society as any historical document.

To get there, I borrowed from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who argued that archives aren’t just collections of records, but systems that shape what can be known, said, or remembered. In Phnom Penh, I wanted to understand: What counts as waste? Who decides? And what deeper histories shape those decisions?

Colonial Plastics, War-Time Aluminum, and Aspirations of Modernity

Surprisingly, the answers took me far beyond the dumpster. I found myself tracing how materials like aluminum and plastic first entered Cambodia—aluminum parachutes from the Vietnam War, plastic goods as luxury imports in the 1960s, and later, their transformation into symbols of prosperity and progress.

But they also came with baggage: foreign influence, development agendas, and imported solutions to “problems” that weren’t always understood in the same way locally.

For example, global strategies like the “circular economy”—where waste is reimagined as a resource—sound promising. But what happens when those ideas are transplanted onto a city like Phnom Penh, which already has its own dynamic and informal recycling systems?

Trash Talks (If You Listen Closely)

The Ed Jais and the informal infrastructures they create challenge official waste strategies. While policy-makers design clean, modern solutions, these grassroots systems operate on different values—ones shaped by proximity, necessity, history, and ingenuity.

Understanding those systems requires what I call “circular researching”—a method that moves back and forth in time, across disciplines, and into unexpected corners of the city. It asks us to listen to the hidden rules and broken rhythms that shape how urban life unfolds.

From Researcher to Circularist

In the end, my talk was an invitation: let’s be more than historians or urban planners. Let’s become circularists—people who trace connections, question dominant narratives, and allow seemingly small things, like a pile of discarded plastic, to open up big questions.

If this piqued your curiosity, you can still catch the full talk online:🎥 Watch here