Elana Faye Resnick

ELANA RESNICK, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2022 to aid research and writing on “Refusing Sustainability: Life Beyond Waste at the Edges of Europe.” Sustainability has become a touchstone for “green” development, promising an antidote to capitalism’s excess: waste. “Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe” (Stanford University Press, 2025), presents a fundamentally different account of sustainability and waste itself by addressing the entanglements of environmentalism and racialized labor. It traces the intersections of waste and race to ask how we might imagine new possibilities for change amid conditions of environmental degradation and pervasive racism. Anti-Roma racism is ubiquitous across Europe. In Bulgaria, Romani waste workers provide the labor essential to meeting “progressive” European Union mandates all while being treated as social waste. Drawing on fieldwork that spans twenty years, including 11 months working alongside Romani women street sweepers, and years working with waste organizations, political campaigns, NGOs, and activist groups, the book analyzes the power hierarchies at play in both waste management and European expansion projects. Chapters explore the phenomenon of “racial sustainability,” or how the positioning of marginalized communities as expendable sustains progressive environmentalism. Ultimately, Refusing Sustainability approaches Romani life-worlds as spaces of creative production and illustrates how people living amid, working with, and seen as waste refuse to sustain the status quo and together generate new avenues for change.