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Critical and Just SustainabilitiesI combine post/de-colonial theory and urban political ecology to examine the cultural politics of everyday sustainability alongside broader political-economic analyses of systems of production and consumption.
In this writing, I have made arguments about how long-standing and invisibilized cultures of servitude” subsidize the sustainable consumption of elite actors, how "performative environmentalism" stigmatizes poverty, and how sustainability is an unfavorable, but unavoidable terrain of struggle for waste pickers. |
Key Publications |
Anantharaman, M. (2022). Is it sustainable consumption or performative environmentalism?. Consumption and Society, 1(1), 120-143. Available open access here.
Anantharaman, M (2021) “Ecological routes to urban inclusion: theorizing ecological citizenship through informal waste work” in Standing out, fitting in, and the consumption of the world: sustainable consumption in a status-conscious world, eds. Isenhour C and Roscoe, P. Cambridge University Press UK Jack, T., Anantharaman, M., Browne, A. (2020) ““Without cleanliness we can't lead the life, no?” cleanliness practices, (in)accessible infrastructures, social (im)mobility and (un)sustainable consumption in Mysore, India” Social and Cultural Geography. Available open access here. Anantharaman, M., Huddart-Kennedy, E. Middlemiss, L., and Bradbury, S. (2019) “Who is represented in community-based sustainable consumption projects, and why does it matter? A constructively critical approach” in Power, Politics and Ideology in Sustainable Consumption Research, eds. Middlemiss, L., Isenhour, C. and Martiskainen, M. Routledge UK. Anantharaman, M. (2018) Critical Sustainable Consumption: A research agenda. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. 8:553–561. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-018-0487-4. Pre-print on Academia.edu. Anantharaman, M. (2016) Elite and ethical: the defensive distinctions of middle-class bicycling in Bangalore, India. Journal of Consumer Culture. 17 (3), 864-886. http://doi.org/10.1177/146954051663441. Pre-print on Academia.edu. Anantharaman, M. (2014) Networked ecological citizenships, the new middle classes and the provisioning of sustainable waste management in Bangalore, India. Journal of Cleaner Production 63: 173-183. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2013.08.041. Pre-print on Academia.edu. |
Book project
Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability examines conflicts surrounding Bengaluru’s waste metabolisms as a lens into questions of urban sustainability discourse and practice. A product of my decade-long engagement with Bengaluru’s Zero Waste Movement, the book shows how diverse social groups adopt, contest and modify neoliberal sustainability’s emphasis on markets, efficiency and aesthetic conflation of clean with green. Tracing the flows of both waste materials and sustainability discourses, I link an examination of middle class (sustainable) consumption with the (environmental) labor of the working poor to offer 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 Southern cities as passive recipients of environmental injustice. In what follows, I offer an alternative perspective, that instead analyzes consumers’ and waste-pickers’ interactions within urban waste metabolisms.
Drawing on ethnographic and community-based research, I demonstrate how urban consumers, emboldened by the state to see themselves as stewards of the city, are mobilizing to green their lifestyle practices and neighborhoods through performative environmentalism. However, elite sustainability advocacy deepens stigmas around poverty and displaces informal sector livelihoods that depend on access to recyclable materials, harming the city's poor and working classes. Against the odds, the urban poor are responding through organizing of their own. In particular, waste pickers are strategically greening their talk and work to demand recognition and legitimacy as entrepreneurial environmentalists. They convene partnerships with environmental groups to gain inclusion in low-tech, labor intensive and community-controlled zero waste DIY infrastructures. While waste pickers have used the global urban sustainability agenda to create new avenues for social inclusion and political participation, the same agenda also reproduces unequal distributions of risk and responsibility. Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist and urban political ecology, Recycling Class argues that achieving just and sustainable cities ultimately requires resisting the seduction of neoliberal logics of growth, efficiency and entrepreneurism to recover the urban commons from the detritus of a commoditized society.
Drawing on ethnographic and community-based research, I demonstrate how urban consumers, emboldened by the state to see themselves as stewards of the city, are mobilizing to green their lifestyle practices and neighborhoods through performative environmentalism. However, elite sustainability advocacy deepens stigmas around poverty and displaces informal sector livelihoods that depend on access to recyclable materials, harming the city's poor and working classes. Against the odds, the urban poor are responding through organizing of their own. In particular, waste pickers are strategically greening their talk and work to demand recognition and legitimacy as entrepreneurial environmentalists. They convene partnerships with environmental groups to gain inclusion in low-tech, labor intensive and community-controlled zero waste DIY infrastructures. While waste pickers have used the global urban sustainability agenda to create new avenues for social inclusion and political participation, the same agenda also reproduces unequal distributions of risk and responsibility. Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist and urban political ecology, Recycling Class argues that achieving just and sustainable cities ultimately requires resisting the seduction of neoliberal logics of growth, efficiency and entrepreneurism to recover the urban commons from the detritus of a commoditized society.
