REFUSING SUSTAINABILITY

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 Elana Resnick examines the power hierarchies that shape both waste management and European geopolitics Instead of focusing on only environmental harms or toxic distributions Refusing Sustainability approaches Romani life worlds as spaces of creative production and also tells several larger stories of postsocialist racial capitalism environmental progressivism democratic failures mutual aid and the power of women s friendships Through these stories Resnick illuminates how ordina