Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability

The talk will address the complexities of pursuing and governing sustainability amid enduring and pernicious socio-cultural inequality. Drawing on long-term ethnographic and community-based research in Bengaluru, India, I examine the infrastructural labor and political activism of informal recyclers in relation to elite environmental movements, municipal efforts to implement greening policies, and the transnational circular economy agenda. Through a situated, intersectional and relational analysis, and applying a multifaceted theoretical toolkit, I discuss how mainstream sustainability and circular economy discourses obscure the politics of environmental casteism while simultaneously relying on racialized and caste-based labor to materialize sustainability. The talk concludes with some proposals for more reparative and transformative environmentalists.

Manisha Anantharaman is Assistant Professor at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations at Sciences Po, Paris. Her research explores inequality in ecological transitions. She has published two books connecting environmental justice, sustainability, and development: “Recycling Class: The contradictions of inclusion in urban sustainability” (MIT Press, 2024) and a co-edited volume “The Circular Economy and the Global South” (Routledge, UK, 2019). Her current research project on Digitalization and household consumption is funded by Belmont Forum/US National Science Foundation.

The lecture is jointly organized with the Heidelberg Centre for the Environment (HCE), the South Asia Institute (SAI), in cooperation with the Institut für Soziologie - Heidelberg University. 

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