Short biography

Professor Jutta Gutberlet obtained her PhD in Geography at the University of Tübingen, Germany in 1990. Since then, she has worked as professional officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome and Ecuador and as Lecturer in the University of Newcastle, Australia (1996-2000). Since 2001 she works at the University of Victoria, Canada and holds a full professorship since 2016. She is the director of the Community-Based Research Laboratory (since 2004) and co-founder of UNICATA the University for and with waste pickers, with head office in Brazil (since 2023). In her research she examines the political and social dimensions of waste, highlighting the roles of waste pickers and grassroots organizations. She bridges academic inquiry with community-led activism, applying interdisciplinary, action-oriented methodology. Primarily funded by the Canadian government through Tri-Agency funding, she focuses on advancing equitable and climate just development paradigms related to waste. She has widely published peer reviewed articles, book chapters and books, such as the 2024 co-edited book Waste Research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Perspectives: Reopening the Bin, by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Research areas

Discard studies
Waste governance
Climate justice
Waste picker organizations
Popular education

Publications

She has made significant contributions to the fields of discard studies and community-based participatory methodology through her research and publications. She has co-authored over 160 academic journal articles, book chapters and reports, besides also producing a great variety of research outputs transforming complex scientific findings into accessible formats, including videos, StoryMaps, Zins or exhibits.