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Critical SustainabilitiesI combine post-colonial theory and urban political ecology to study the ways in which sustainability initiatives and environmental movements reinforce or dismantle different manifestations of race, class, gender and caste-based oppression.
This work began Bengaluru, India where I used ethnographic and community-based methods to examine how efforts by elite environmentalists to design sustainability infrastructures impacted Bangalore’s waste-engaged poor and working classes, and conversely the ways in which the latter co-opt, resist and negotiate elite environmental activism. Since, I have expanded this work through comparative case studies in the UK, Canada, China and other parts of the world, as well as authoring review essays and critical perspectives. In this writing, I have made arguments about how long-standing and invisibilized “cultures of servitude” subsidize the sustainable consumption of elite actors, and how sustainability movements stigmatize poverty, and how sustainability is an unfavorable, but unavoidable terrain of struggle for waste pickers. |
Book project
Transformative 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 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, Transformative Sustainability 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, Transformative Sustainability 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.
Representative Publications |
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. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2020.1820561 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 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 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 |
