From Infrastructural Labor to Entrepreneurial Environmentalisms

Formé en janvier 2021, notre collectif de recherche compte actuellement dix doctorant.es du Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CSO) et du Centre de Recherche sur les Inégalités Sociales (CRIS) qui abordent dans leur travail la question du sens écologique que certain.es acteur.ices donnent à leurs pratiques. L’objet de notre collectif de recherche est de s’interroger sur la pluralité des sens donnés à ces notions, par les acteur.ices comme par les sociologues qui les observent.

Périodicité

Un mercredi par mois, en salle CS16 de 16h à 18h à Sciences Po au 1, place Saint-Thomas 75007 Paris.

Le séminaire est ouvert à tout.e.s sur inscription (obligatoire) en remplissant le lien suivant: https://forms.gle/dxiDy8VeWdC4LvRUA

Manisha Anantharaman, Assistant professor at Sciences Po.

Titre de l’intervention :

“From Infrastructural Labor to Entrepreneurial Environmentalisms”

Résumé :

In the context of elite-dominated environmental “neoliberal sustainability” agendas that deny ecological legitimacy to the poor and favor privatization and marketization as solutions to environmental problems, how do groups who are threatened by elite-driven sustainability initiatives protect their livelihoods and interests? And what does an examination of the claims-making strategies utilized by excluded constituencies tell us about the ways in which dominant urban sustainability discourses constrain or encourage possibilities for involvement and action by highly marginalized groups? In this talk, Manisha Anantharaman will draw on her recent book Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability, to juxtapose elite “performative environmentalism” (often (mis)labeled as sustainable consumption) with the environmental labor of the working poor to offer some reflections on the class politics of urban ecological transitions. Drawing on a long-term study in Bengaluru, she will discuss how groups representing waste pickers created a new mode of entrepreneurial environmentalism that put a spin on the environmentalism of the poor— a term usually used to describe the struggles of working-class, rural peasants and forest-dependent communities in the Global South against development and infrastructural projects that threaten their livelihoods and survival in the moment—to instead focus on how their livelihoods sustain urban environments, and discuss what we can learn more broadly about the intersections between work, mobilizations and inequality from this case.