DeepSummary
The episode is a discussion about Manisha Anantharaman's book 'Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability', which explores the connections between middle-class sustainable consumption practices and the environmental labor of the working poor in Bangalore, India. The author highlights how the city's growing waste problem is democratizing, involving various social groups and creating opportunities for political resistance and new coalitions.
Anantharaman explains how her decade-long ethnographic study reveals the class, caste, and gender politics surrounding unmanaged waste in Bangalore. She examines the co-evolution of middle-class environmentalism and the activism of waste pickers, who challenge existing discourses and norms. The book argues that achieving just and ecologically safe cities requires resisting neoliberal logics and reclaiming the urban commons.
The discussion also touches on Anantharaman's positionality as a middle-class Brahmin woman and how her research process politicized her, forcing her to confront her own socialization into casteism. The guests emphasize the importance of studying sustainability beyond affluent societies and theorizing from the Global South to offer important concepts and correctives for the field.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- The book examines the interconnections and contradictions between middle-class sustainable consumption practices and the labor of marginalized waste workers in Bangalore.
- Waste infrastructures can create opportunities for political resistance and new coalitions across diverse social groups.
- Urban sustainability efforts often reproduce unequal distributions of risk and responsibility along class, caste, and gender lines.
- The author's own positionality and socialization into casteism influenced her research process and analysis.
- Studying sustainability in Asian contexts and theorizing from the Global South can offer important concepts and correctives for the field.
- Achieving just and ecologically safe cities requires resisting neoliberal logics and reclaiming the urban commons.
- The concept of "expendability" helps analyze how privileged groups normalize the exploitation and marginalization of certain populations.
- The book advocates for a relational and intersectional approach to understanding urban sustainability politics and practice.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “So, in the book, I focus a lot on middle class communities who are trying to kind of clean up streets, trying to kind of address the problem of garbage by changing behaviors in their homes, setting up these communal, neighborhood based infrastructures of zero waste, promoting recycling and composting, but also from waste workers who are engaged in waste labor and resource recovery in this increasingly kind of very diverse material culture, different types of plastics, etcetera.“ by Manisha Anantharaman
- “So, waste infrastructures, I think, through the people it brings together and the metabolic connections it creates, can also provide opportunities for political resistance, change, sometimes even convening new relationships and unexpected coalitions, I argue in the book.“ by Manisha Anantharaman
- “And so I also here draw a lot of inspiration from the work of critical environmental justice theorists, particularly David Pello's idea of expendability. And I'll explain what I'm trying to say here. So I think we live in a world that is marked by what David Pellow calls this logic of expendability. Where privilege, caste, class, race normalizes, treating racialized and marginalized populations as disposable, infinitely exploitable, and where privileged groups really assume that their fates are unlinked to the fates of other groups.“ by Manisha Anantharaman
- “So, for me, theorizing from the south, I think, can offer really important concepts and correctives for sustainability research all over the world. So, I mean, I hope that the field can take on a more comparative orientation and not just see studies of Asia as, you know, as exceptions, as these exotic places where you see these interesting, weird things like caste.“ by Manisha Anantharaman
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Episode Information
New Books in Environmental Studies
Marshall Poe
6/7/24
What types of coalitions can deliver social justice within sustainability initiatives? And how can we avoid reproducing unjust distributions of risk and responsibility in urban sustainability efforts? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Arve Hansen, and Manisha Anantharaman discuss these questions by engaging with Anantharaman’s new book Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability (MIT Press, 2024), a unique ethnographic exploration that links middle-class, sustainable consumption with the environmental labour of the working poor to offer a relational analysis of urban sustainability politics and practice. The focus is on Bangalore in India, but the arguments and findings have much wider resonances.
- Manisha Anantharaman is Assistant Professor at the Center for the Sociology of Organisations at Sciences Po in Paris.
- Arve Hansen is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, and co-leader of the Norwegian Network of Asian Studies.
- Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based in Oslo, and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.
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