Areas, not a thesis.
My research sits between food-systems scholarship, political economy, and discard studies. I read broadly across traditions — political ecology, critical sustainability, feminist political economy, science and technology studies, and the epistemological/ontological turns in social theory — and I'm currently working out where my own doctoral project lives in relation to all of this.
Three overlapping areas organize what I'm working on right now:
- 01
Food waste, discard studies, and the politics of knowledge
How does food come to be categorized as waste? What does that categorization do — politically, economically, ecologically? Who gets to frame food waste as a problem, and what do different framings foreclose? I'm interested in what critical discard studies and political-ecology approaches open up relative to dominant behavioural and logistical accounts.
- 02
Power, corporate concentration, and governance in the global food economy
Following work by Jennifer Clapp, Phil Howard, IPES-Food, and others, I'm interested in the structural concentration of the global food economy and in how that concentration shapes what is grown, traded, priced, wasted, and changed. I'm particularly interested in holding instrumental, structural, discursive, and constitutive accounts of power in the same analytical frame.
- 03
Transformation, theories of change, and the knowledge-to-action gap
Decades of critical food-systems scholarship has produced diagnosis without much transformation. I'm drawn to work on social-movement strategy, the politics of expertise, the sociology of knowledge, and what forms of research and communication might actually contribute to structural change rather than describing the conditions that prevent it.
These are areas I'm working in, not a thesis. My dissertation is still in scoping.
Doctoral dissertation (in scoping)
My dissertation is currently in the comprehensive-exam and scoping phase. I'm drawing together the three areas described above, but I haven't committed to a specific empirical focus, case, or argument — that's exactly what I'm working out this year. If you're interested in what's currently on the table, I'd welcome the conversation.
Past academic work
Think Inside the Box: The Role of Sustainable Packaging in Environmentally Conscientious Shopping
This thesis examined consumer engagements with sustainable-packaging discourses and the political work that “sustainable packaging” does as a category — including, I argue, its role in deflecting attention from consumption itself. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/15805
Social Debitage: An archaeological and social exploration of the patterns of improper cigarette butt disposal on a university campus
An archaeological and ethnographic study of cigarette-butt disposal patterns on a university campus, treating improperly-discarded butts as a form of “social debitage” — patterned material traces of everyday behaviour. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/12051
Applied research & technical reports
Qualitative coding of news and journal articles tracking geopolitical shifts in the global food economy associated with US tariff measures from January 2025, under Dr. Jennifer Clapp.
Led development of an organization-wide mixed-methods survey; facilitated workshops for a sustainable procurement initiative; contributed writing, editing, and fact-checking for sustainability-standards reports.
Qualitative coding of online media in support of a project on Indigenous entrepreneurship.
Publications
- Tottman, W. (2024). Think Inside the Box: The Role of Sustainable Packaging in Environmentally Conscientious Shopping. MSc Thesis, University of Victoria.
- Tottman, W. (2020). Social Debitage: An archaeological and social exploration of the patterns of improper cigarette butt disposal on a university campus. Honours Thesis, University of Victoria.
- Tottman, W. (2019). Nuu-chah-nulth Shellfish Harvesting Practices Over Time at Kakmakimilh (306T): Column Sample Analysis of 2017–2019. Technical report, Historical Ecology and Coastal Archaeology program, Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre.