What makes a material noticeable, and what allows it to recede from perception even as it gathers around us?

I am a doctoral researcher in Landscape Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. My doctoral project, provisionally entitled Plastic Waste Entanglements: Sensory Encounters in the Urbanscape of Turku, brings environmental humanities, sensory inquiry, and feminist posthumanities into conversation to explore how plastic waste comes to matter in everyday urban life. I follow how micro- and nanoplastics are shed, dispersed, and gathered through the ordinary movements and transformations of urban life, and how plastic can become at once felt and unfelt through sensory and atmospheric experience.

Through practices of sensory attunement, I explore how perception, embodiment, and material circulation emerge through one another, and how urban environments bring certain forms of matter forward while allowing others to slip from notice. More broadly, I am interested in questions of environmental perception and the sensory conditions of living with plastic in more-than-human worlds.

Selected publications

Ogutveren Aular, Neylan. Under review. “The Sound of Wear: Speculative Sensibility in Microplastic Atmospheres.” In Oxford Intersections: Cultures of Waste (“Waste Futures”).

Ogutveren Aular, Neylan. Forthcoming. “Walking with Plastic Waste: Resonant Fieldwork Practices for Working with Presence-as-Absence.” Nordia Geographical Publications.

Ogutveren Aular, Neylan. 2024. “Plastic Waste (In)Visibility in Plasticity.” Tahiti 14 (1): 76–92. https://doi.org/10.23995/tht.142704.