Séminaire EOS
Manisha Anantharaman

Discussion by Elisabetta Rosa (UCLouvain)

Résumé

This talk will address the complexities of pursuing and governing sustainability amid enduring and pernicious socio-cultural inequality. Drawing on long-term ethnographic and community-based research in Bengaluru, India, I examine the infrastructural labor and political activism of informal recyclers in relation to elite environmental movements, municipal efforts to implement greening policies, and the transnational circular economy agenda. Through a situated, intersectional and relational analysis, and applying a multifaceted theoretical toolkit, I discuss how mainstream sustainability and circular economy discourses obscure the politics of environmental casteism while simultaneously relying on racialized and caste-based labor to materialize sustainability. The talk concludes with some proposals for more reparative and transformative environmentalisms. 

Manisha Anantharaman (PhD, HDR) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Center for the Sociology of Organisations (CNRS/Sciences Po). She works at the intersection of economic and cultural sociology, political ecology, and critical theory, using ethnographic methods to study how ecological transitions are shaped by inequality, identity, and institutions. She has published two books connecting environmental justice, sustainability, and development: “Recycling Class: The contradictions of inclusion in urban sustainability” (MIT Press, 2024) and a co-edited volume “The Circular Economy and the Global South” (Routledge, UK, 2019).