Amrina Rosyada

My dissertation explores how citizens use everyday waste practices and politics to claim their rights to a more equitable infrastructure. I conducted a 15-month (July 2024 – October 2025) fieldwork in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a city facing waste infrastructural inequalities and waste crises. Drawing on literature about waste infrastructure and citizenship, I investigated how Yogyakartans employ quotidian ways by engaging with technology, politics, aesthetics, and faith to claim their rights for a better waste infrastructure amidst the certainty of pollution. I conducted participant observation in more than 40 waste-related events in Yogyakarta and Jakarta, both online and in person; interviewed 55 research participants with around 100 hours of recording time; and collected various archives (e.g. newspapers, reports, maps, and photographs) from local libraries in Yogyakarta. From the data I collected, I have identified three current key findings: 1) that women’s invisible and often unpaid labor is being coopted into waste governance in Yogyakarta; 2) Yogyakartans engage with grassroots waste management technologies—often those with unreliable effectivity—as a reaction towards grand technological promises that fail to save the community from toxicity; and 3) that religion plays a big part in motivating many waste activists and citizens into creating a better and cleaner environment.