I am a doctoral researcher in Landscape Studies at the University of Turku. I study plastic waste, particularly micro- and nanoplastics, in Nordic urban environments.

Our relations with waste often begin when it claims our attention: when it is seen, smelled, sorted or thrown away. Microplastics rarely claim attention in this way. They are shed through everyday use and circulate through the atmospheres and landscapes we inhabit, mostly without being noticed or discarded. What we sense and what we take in can be parts of the same material process, distinguished only afterwards through the ways we perceive, measure and name it.

I call this condition in/sensibility: the shifting relation between what becomes perceptible and what enters experience without being perceived. My research stays with this shifting relation. Through embodied and speculative inquiry, I ask how relations with plastic take shape before it is recognised as plastic, and what ethical responses might emerge from that involvement. in questions of environmental perception and the sensory conditions of living with plastic in more-than-human worlds.

Selected publications

Ogutveren Aular, N. (2026). Walking with plastic waste: Resonant practices for working with presence-as-absence. Nordia Geographical Publications, 55(4), 29–52. https://doi.org/10.30671/nordia.175969

Ogutveren Aular, N. (2024). Plastic waste (in)visibility in plasticity. Tahiti, 14(1), 76–92. https://doi.org/10.23995/tht.142704

Ogutveren Aular, N. The Sound of Wear: Speculative Sensibility in Microplastic Atmospheres. Submitted to Oxford Intersections: Cultures of Waste, for the Waste Futures section.

Ogutveren Aular, N. Walking Try-outs Microplastics: Ethical Relations with Microplastic Atmospheres. Chapter submitted for Walking as Research Praxis: Human–Nonhuman Matterings, Attunements and Ethics, edited by C. A. Taylor and N. Fairchild, Routledge.