Elana Resnick's Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe (Stanford University Press, 2025) presents findings from two decades of fieldwork in Bulgaria focused on Roma communities, the largest minority in Europe. To understand everyday effects of environmental rules she lived and worked with Romani people, including nearly a year as a contracted street sweeper in Sofia on a team of 40 women. This direct participation revealed both the physical dangers of the job and the social abuses workers face.
Resnick formulates a "waste-race nexus": an analytical idea that the people treated as disposable and the waste they handle become mutually reinforcing categories. She shows how Bulgaria's EU-driven upgrades to waste systems and recycling rely, in practice, on Roma labor that is stigmatized and underpaid. At the same time, street sweeping allowed women to gather, joke and strategize, which Resnick describes as everyday "refusal politics"—small acts of solidarity and self-definition that push back against exclusion.
The book stresses that many sustainability initiatives are assumed to be unquestionably good, yet they often rest on the unrecognized labor of communities of color and women. Resnick does not offer a single remedy; rather she calls for diagnosing and recognizing the systems that link environmental policy to long-standing racial orders. Though set in Bulgaria, the study speaks to global issues of white supremacy, climate change and racism.
- Two decades of fieldwork and participant observation
- Waste systems tied to racialized labor
- Everyday solidarity as resistance
Difficult words
- fieldwork — long research in real social settings
- participant observation — research method where researcher lives with participants
- stigmatize — to mark someone as socially unacceptablestigmatized
- underpay — to pay someone less than fair amountunderpaid
- refusal politics — small everyday acts resisting exclusion and control
- waste-race nexus — link between waste systems and racial hierarchies
- sustainability initiative — project or policy aimed at environmental sustainabilitysustainability initiatives
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Discussion questions
- How can policymakers redesign sustainability initiatives so they do not rely on stigmatized and underpaid labor? Give concrete ideas.
- What role did everyday solidarity play for the women street sweepers in Sofia, and why does that matter for resistance?
- Do you think the study's findings about Bulgaria can apply to other countries? Explain with reasons from the text or your own observations.
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