Willow Ross is a cultural geographer and postgraduate researcher raised on the unceded lands of the Kaurna, Wurundjeri and Bunurong peoples. She is interested in the intersections of waste, activism, and creative methods. Her research asks how ordinary people come to politicise the things and places we throw away – and how they fight back.

Willow uses participatory and creative methods to draw out feminist geographies of place and waste. In the past, this has included urban walking tours, ‘dive-along’ interviews with dumpster divers, zine-making and collaging workshops, and community recipe book-making. She is guided by writing from stolen lands (so-called ‘Australia’) and writings on shadow places, shadow care, and informal economies of waste.

Willow is currently publishing research on dumpster diving in Naarm/Melbourne and beginning a her research project on anti-nuclear waste activism. She also teaches and works as a research associate in history and geography, asking how people are shaped by connections with urban and rural natures, more-than-human worlds, and how identities are mediated by power and resistance in place.