Dagna Rams has completed her doctoral fieldwork in scrapyards, e-waste sites, smelters and metal buying companies in Ghana. She is interested in the multiple ways that unprecedented levels of metal demand from the 1990s onwards have altered landscapes, livelihoods, and economies. Her doctoral thesis examined the popularisation of scrap economies in West Africa and Ghana and considered the broader implications of scrap metal for thinking about resource management, industrialisation and de-industrialisation, international commodity chains, and technological innovation. She is currently transforming her doctoral thesis into a manuscript that will examine the patterns of the extractive regimes that emerge around waste, scrap, and their international travels. She co-edited a volume on anthropological perspectives on the circular economy to be published later in 2023.

In 2023, she begins a new research that investigates how metal markets and technological companies conceive of metal supply and its sustainability, and factor those considerations into their operations. The research speaks to interest in resource limitations to economic, environmental, and technological future-making. Her work is sponsored by the PostDoc Mobility scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation.