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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. |
Publications |
Anantharaman, M (Accepted) “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 |
Book project |
Transforming Sustainability is a critical counter-story about making sustainable cities told from Bengaluru, India. Through an ethnographic and community-engaged study of Bengaluru’s Zero Waste Movement, it examines the ways in which paradigmatic notions of sustainability built upon neoliberal common sense and green aesthetics are taken up, modified and contested by diverse social groups in the city. Tracing the flows of waste materials and sustainability discourses, it links 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. In doing so, this book moves beyond simplistic narratives 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 to instead analyze their interacting consumption and livelihood practices within urban waste metabolisms and infrastructures. Drawing on urban political ecology and post-colonial theory, Transforming Sustainability argues that while the global urban sustainability agenda has created new avenues for social inclusion and political participation by waste pickers, it can reproduce unequal distributions of risk and responsibility.
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