Legal infrastructures for discarded electronics: Trailing transboundary flows between Europe and Ghana

PhD defence by Leonora Kleppa Stærfeldt

Assessment Committee

Professor WSR Mikkel Jarle Christensen, Center for Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen (Chairperson)
Associate Professor Elisabeth Schober, University of Oslo
Associate Professor Itamar Mann, University of Haifa

Supervisors

Professor Thomas Graae Gammeltoft-Hansen
Professor Henrik Erdman Vigh

Place

Building: South Campus - Faculty of Law, Room: Auditorium 4A.0.69, Njalsgade 76, 2300, Copenhagen

Email address to gain access to the thesis: phd-forsvar@jur.ku.dk.
You will either receive a copy of the thesis or be informed where you can read a physical copy.

Recipients of copies of the thesis are not allowed to share or distribute it due to copyright compliance.

Short description of the thesis

The regulation of transboundary movements of discarded electronics is a dynamic site of legal intervention, reflecting concerns about the environmental impacts and risks to human health of disposal. Yet, despite a flurry of legal developments, little is known about what role law plays in the transboundary movements of discarded electronics, and how actors who encounter these rules navigate them. Combining legal analysis with ethnographic research conducted in the Netherlands and Ghana, the PhD thesis examines these interactions, trailing discarded electronics from dispatch to destination.

The thesis works through and extends legal infrastructures, a nascent framework in empirical legal studies. In doing so, the thesis demonstrates how the regulation of discarded electronics represents an uneven space of dispersion, with rules from various regimes oscillating between repelling, enabling and shaping flows. This legal landscape is in turn navigated by actors on the ground. The thesis further shows that this relationship is recursive: law is continuously reshaped through the very practices it seeks to govern. Accordingly, transnational flows of discarded electronics emerge as dynamic processes in which law and action continually interact.

The thesis speaks to legal and empirical research on transnational circulations of discarded electronics and contributes to the analytical framework of legal infrastructures and socio-legal scholarship.