Environmental Rules and Roma Lives in Bulgaria ^{CEFR B1}

In Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe (Stanford University Press, 2025), anthropologist Elana Resnick draws on two decades of research in Bulgaria and sustained fieldwork in Romani communities. She lived and worked alongside the people she studied, including nearly a year as a contracted street sweeper in Sofia on a team of 40 Romani women.

Resnick reports that the work exposed women to danger and abuse: passersby shouted slurs and sometimes threw lit cigarette butts at their uniforms, and supervisors watched the workers closely. From these observations she develops the concept of a waste-race nexus: people treated as disposable and the waste they handle become mutually reinforcing categories.

She argues that EU membership pushed Bulgaria to upgrade waste and recycling systems, yet Roma people often do the visible labor that makes those standards possible. Street sweeping also created space for public life, and small acts of solidarity—what Resnick calls a refusal politics—help people resist exclusion. The book does not give a single solution; instead it urges recognition of the systems that link environmental policy to long-standing racial orders and notes the relevance of these dynamics beyond Bulgaria.