In this Development Research Seminar, Manisha Anantharaman will address the complexities of pursuing and governing sustainability amid enduring and pernicious socio-cultural inequality.
- Assistant professor
- Date
- Tuesday 3 Dec 2024, 16:15 - 17:30
- Type
- Seminar
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- Room 4.39
- Location
- International Institute of Social Studies
Drawing on long-term community-based research in Bengaluru, India, she examines the infrastructural labour and political activism of informal recyclers in relation to elite environmental movements, municipal efforts to implement greening policies and the transnational circular economy agenda.
She will 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 urban sustainability and render resource flows more circular.
Her talk concludes with some proposals for more reparative and transformative environmentalisms that centre the political agency of informal workers and move beyond the 'win-win' fallacy.
About the speaker
Dr Manisha Anantharaman is Assistant Professor at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations at Sciences Po, Paris. Her research explores inequality in ecological transitions.
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).
Her research projects include a Belmont Forum/US National Science Foundation funded project studying Digitalization and household consumption and a Swiss Network of International Studies project on Green public spaces and sustainable wellbeing
- More information
The Development Research seminars present cutting-edge research on development studies by noted scholars from around the world. The Series aims to stimulate critical discussion about contemporary development issues.
