Refusing Sustainability

Elana Resnick is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"Elana Resnick seamlessly weaves her own, powerful experiences as a street sweeper as she makes compelling arguments about sustainability policies and forms of racialization at play at the margins of Europe. The writing sparkles and the book's key contributions to discussions about environmentalism are important and timely - this is a superb book." -Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, author of Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine "With some of the best ethnographic writing our field has seen in years, Resnick takes us into the racialized landscapes of environmentalism that few, if ever, want to recognize, but also ones so thick with example around disposal, deferral, and distancing that it is impossible to not keep reading. Richly evoked Romani worlds, conjured here with humor and insight, challenge the segregationisms of our contemporary life." -Bruce Grant, New York University "Resnick confronts the enduring, mutually constituting relationship between modernity and race in this innovative and beautifully written ethnography. Bringing us to Bulgaria where the absent presence of race haunts environmental sustainability efforts, Refusing Sustainability, identifies the subtleties embedded in taken for granted investments in environmental protections that reinforce the status quo of racial order. Through the deft employment of grounded ethnography as theory, Resnick poses the possibility of imagining life-worlds beyond the destructive forces that render some lives and ways of being as excess, waste, and disposable." -Aimee Meredith Cox, New York University