Bhavna Middha

Bhavna is an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) recipient for 2024 and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Research in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies. 

She is a sustainable consumption scholar and a social practice theorist. Her research spans the sociology and geographies of consumption through topics such as food, plastics and packaging, energy, and waste. Bhavna’s work has explored and advanced the practice perspective in sustainable consumption by focusing on justice and equity aspects of sustainability transitions. A strong focus of her work has been on qualitative research methods, where digital ethnography has been an important aspect of her empirical work.

Bhavna is also a CI on the $21 million ARC Industrial Transformation and Research Hub - Transformation of Reclaimed Waste Resources to Engineered Materials and Solutions for a Circular Economy (TREMS) (2021-2026). As part of the hub, she researches the social and policy dimensions of waste production, consumption and management in apartments.

Bhavna co-leads the 'Social Practices and Sustainable Consumption' Enabling Impact Network at RMIT.

She also co-leads RMIT's interdisciplinary 'Food Cultures and Practices' Enabling Impact Network.

Her DECRA research titled, “Tackling food-related single-use plastics in diverse consumption contexts” aims to investigate the uneven impacts of interventions that target consumers’ engagement with single-use food plastics by utilising critical social science approaches. This research expects to create new knowledge through an evidence base in sustainable consumption and waste studies using innovative qualitative techniques. Expected outcomes of this project include conceptual and methodological approaches that enhance societal capabilities for practicable waste management. This will provide significant benefits by improving Australia’s capacity to develop and integrate lived experiences of single-use food plastics into the current and future National Waste Policy and National Plastics Plan"

Bhavna has previously led a project funded by End Food Waste Australia (previously Fight Food Waste CRC), researching connections between consumer meat waste and refrigerator use.

In 2022 she led a Fuel Poverty Research Network’s (UK) funded ECR research project, 'Examining multiple vulnerabilities through the nexus of food and fuel poverty'.

Some of Bhavna’s previous research experience has included

CI - Sector Action Plan for Cafes (EFW Australia) and the Cafe Lab: A zero-waste food justice initiative and living lab that aims to support circularity in hospitality and help insecure Melburnians

Examining and proposing scenarios for 20-minute neighbourhoods in green-field sites in Melbourne (Living locally: Beveridge)

CI - An AHURI-funded research project that was a rapid response to capture the changing lived experiences of low-income households in Victoria during COVID-19 (The lived experience of COVID-19: housing and household resilience)