We are living in a time of global polycrisis including climate change, income inequality, homelessness, racism and the legacy of white colonialism, threats to our physical health and mental well-being, pervasive drug addiction among others. The magnitude of these crises can lead to us feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed. This paper illustrates our experience as recyclers managing through municipal implementation of new garbage recycling systems and our fieldwork researching trash in Aarhus, Denmark and New York City. Feeling on the city streets intense micro moments of shame and hopelessness, we discover the interrelatedness of the crises and come to painful insights into ourselves. Insights that also, counter intuitively, open a pathway to new consciousness, new selves and to taking action in the everyday. As we go about our recycling at home and in the field we have been reading Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 classic Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza from which we take inspiration and her ideas are braided through our writing. Our discovery we hope will help others who feel overwhelmed in the face of global polycrises find ways to self-insight, active acting, and a new citizen consciousness. Our text is outlined to meet the format of the Academy of Management Journal Discoveries-through-prose, a feature-length article targeting a non-academic audience yet still academic, placing methodology as appendix after references towards end of paper, using limited academic referencing (max 20), photographs in addition to text, and incorporating empirical material throughout the paper making visible the phenomenon abductively discovered.
