Recycling Class: the Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability

Manisha Anantharaman, qui rejoint le CSO en tant qu'assistant professor, soutient uen Habilitation à diriger des recherches en sociologie.

Sujet :

Recycling Class: the Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability

Jury :

Hervé CORVELLEC, Sophie DUBUISSON‑QUELLIER (Directrice de recherche), Francesca FORNO, Matthew PATERSON, Marlyne SAHAKIAN, Tommaso VITALE

La soutenance publique aura lieu le 13/12/2023 à 14h30 en salle K.011, IEP de Paris, 1 place Saint‑Thomas d'Aquin, Paris 7e

Summary :

The monograph Recycling Class studies the ideas, flows, and relationships around unmanaged discards in Bengaluru, India, itself a massive environmental problem of planetary proportions, to critically examine what types of coalitions pursue social justice within urban sustainability initiatives. The monograph traces the flows of both waste materials and sustainability discourses, to link an examination of middle-class (sustainable) consumption with the (environmental) labor of the working poor, offering a relational analysis of urban sustainability politics and practice. It is well past time to move beyond simplistic accounts of sustainability that frame the expanding Indian middle class as rapacious, environmentally unconscious consumers, or the urban poor in Global South cities as passive recipients of environmental injustice. Recycling Class offers an alternative perspective that instead analyzes consumers’ and waste-pickers’ interactions within urban waste metabolisms. Doing so, it shows how diverse social groups adopt, contest, and modify neoliberal sustainability’s emphasis on market-based solutions, behavior change, and aesthetic conflation of clean with green.

Based on ethnographic and community-based research conducted with middle-class civil society groups and waste picker organizations, and combining qualitative interviews, ethnography, and discourse analysis, this study traces garbage politics in Bengaluru for over a decade. It finds that middle-class “performative environmentalism” and “communal sustainability” efforts create new avenues for waste picker organizations to make claims for infrastructural inclusion as “entrepreneurial environmentalists.” Coproduced “DIY infrastructures” serve as sites of citizenship and political negotiation, challenging the technocratic and growth-based logics of dominant sustainability policies. Yet, these configurations reproduce class, caste, and gender-based divisions of labor, demonstrating that inclusion without social reform can reproduce unjust distributions of risk and responsibility. Revealing the “win-win fallacy” of sustainability and foregrounding the agency of communities excluded from environmental policy, Recycling Class asserts that achieving just and ecologically safe cities ultimately requires resisting the seduction of neoliberal logics of growth, efficiency, and “clean and green” aesthetics, to reclaim the city from the detritus of a consumerist and casteist society.