Humanities Decanted: Elana Resnick

Join us for a dialogue between Elana Resnick (Anthropology) and Charles Hale (Dean of Social Sciences) about Resnick’s new book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe. Sustainability has become a touchstone for development worldwide, promising an antidote to environmental degradation and capitalism’s excess: waste. Refusing Sustainability presents a fundamentally different account of sustainability and waste itself by uncovering the intersections of international environmental reforms and racialized labor. In Bulgaria, Roma comprise the bulk of the country’s waste workers, while anti-Roma racism casts them as socially disposable. Without their labor, however, the country cannot meet the sustainability targets required by the European Union. Drawing on fieldwork that spans twenty years, including eleven months working alongside Romani women street sweepers and years embedded in waste organizations, political campaigns, Roma NGOs, and activist groups, Resnick examines the power hierarchies that shape both waste management and European geopolitics.

Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she directs the Infrastructural Inequalities Research Group. Her research examines waste, racialization, labor, nuclear energy, and friendship through multi-modal methods. She has published in journals including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, and Public Culture. She is the recipient of the 2025 Carolina de Miguel Moyer Young Scholar Award from the Council for European Studies.

Refreshments will be served.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment