Karl Holmberg

Political Science

Research and Areas of Interest

Plastics, material politics, IPE, philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, comparative politics, international relations, and environmental politics. 

Current research

Karl's research focuses on the politics of plastics. This involves a wide range of social science approaches related to plastics as a material and phenomenon. He has written about the lock-in effects of plastics, norms and cultures related to plastics, governance and policy of plastics and the political economy of plastics.

Karl's thesis project focuses on how the disposability of plastics came to be embedded in Sweden during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. He conceptualises embeddedness through three interlocking dynamics; lock-in, practices and hegemony. The first chapter deals with the rise of the self-service store as an arena for disposability, and the second on how plastic packaging came to sell itself as disposable. The third is about the rise of the Stenungsund petrochemical cluster in the wake of plastic disposability, and the fourth chapter focuses on how the development of ideas of waste management and recycling inadvertently came to justify plastic disposability.