Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability

By Manisha Anantharaman

An ethnographic and community-engaged study of the class, caste, and gender politics of environmental mobilizations around Bengaluru, India's discards. In Recycling Class , Manisha Anantharaman examines the ideas, flows, and relationships around unmanaged discards in Bengaluru, India, itself a massive environmental problem of planetary proportions, to help us understand what types of coalitions deliver social justice within sustainability initiatives. Recycling Class links middle-class, sustainable consumption with the environmental labor of the working poor to offer a relational analysis of urban sustainability politics and practice. Through ethnographic, community-based research, Anantharaman shows how diverse social groups adopt, contest, and modify neoliberal sustainability's emphasis on market-based solutions, behavior change, and the aesthetic conflation of "clean" with "green." Tracing garbage politics in Bengaluru for over a decade, Anantharaman argues that middle class "communal sustainability " efforts create new avenues for waste picker organizations to make claims for infrastructural inclusion. 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 will appeal to scholars and activists alike who want to create a future with more transformative sustainability.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262546973
• ISBN13: 9780262546973
• Release Date: January 2024
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 8.9"