Thursday, October 16, 202512:15 PM - 1:45 PM
Haines Hall, Rm 352
About the Talk
Sustainability has become a touchstone for development worldwide, promising an antidote to environmental degradation and capitalism’s excess: waste. Refusing Sustainability offers a different account of both sustainability and waste by uncovering the intersections of international environmental reforms and racialized labor. In Bulgaria, Romani people comprise the bulk of the country’s waste workers, while anti-Roma racism casts them as socially disposable. Yet without their labor, the country cannot meet the sustainability targets required by the European Union. Drawing on twenty years of fieldwork—including eleven months working alongside Romani women street sweepers, and years embedded in waste organizations, political campaigns, Roma NGOs, and activist groups—this talk approaches Romani life-worlds as sites of creative production. In doing so, it illuminates broader dynamics of postsocialist racial capitalism, environmental progressivism, democratic failures, mutual aid, and the generative power of women’s friendships.
About the Speaker
Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she directs the Infrastructural Inequalities Research Group. Her research examines waste, racialization, surveillance, labor, environmentalism, nuclear energy, and friendship through multi-modal methods. She has published in journals including American Anthropologist (2021), Public Culture (2023), American Ethnologist (2024), and Cultural Anthropology (2024). Her book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe, published in July 2025, analyzes the intersections of racialization and environmentalism in contemporary Europe. Her new work, which includes a documentary film, investigates the gendered and racial politics of nuclear power development and decommissioning.
Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Department of Anthropology