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 women 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 post-socialist racial capitalism, progressive environmentalism, democratic failures, mutual aid, and the power of women’s friendships.
This event is co-sponsored by the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, Centre for European Studies, and Department of Anthropology.
