Author Meets Critics on Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability

The roundtable discusses Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability (MIT Press, 2024). Conceptualizing sustainability as “relational terrain,” Manisha Anantharaman examines the ideas, flows, and relations around unmanaged discards in Bengaluru, India, itself a massive environmental problem of planetary proportions, to help us understand what types of coalitions pursue social justice within urban sustainability initiatives. Recycling Class links middle-class "sustainable" consumption with the environmental labor of the working poor to offer a situated and intersectional analysis of urban sustainability politics. 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. The book decenters the focus on global North world cities in environmental sociology, to present a narrative that is grounded in the lived realities of the cities of the majority world, and advances theorizing from the South. Panelists will discuss the book from the perspective of environmental and urban sociology, economic geography, and studies of racial, colonial and caste capitalism.