Presentation by Elana Resnick, Thursday, May 16, 2 PM

We are delighted to invite you to a joint seminar organized by the Department of Mobility and Migration and the Department of Ecological Anthropology. Our guest speaker, Elana Resnick, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will discuss ways environmentalism catalyzes new forms of racialization.

Date: 16 May 2024

Time: 14:00-16:00

Location: Institute of Ethnology CAS, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Praha 1 (Online link below)

Synopsis: How does “progressive” environmentalism catalyze new forms of racialization? Through a multi-scalar approach to waste, this talk reveals the intersections of international environmental reforms, white supremacy, and racialized labor. In Bulgaria, Romani waste workers are figured as disposable even though their labor ensures that the country meets its international environmental sustainability targets. The logics of European sustainability initiatives, I argue, sustain an environment structured on white supremacy and racial capitalism—even as race and racism in Bulgaria are systematically denied. Though firmly positioned in landscapes of environmental neglect and forced to endure the conditions of body-breaking labor, Romani women in particular create new ways of moving past sustainability into something radically more vibrant.

Profile: Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she leads the Infrastructural Inequalities Research Group. She studies waste, race, labor, nuclear power, rivers, and humor using multi-modal research methods. Her work has been published in venues including American Anthropologist, Collaborative Anthropologies, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures and Public Culture—and is forthcoming in American Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology. She received the 2022 American Anthropological Association Annual Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship and the 2023 Women’s Forum Article Prize of the British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies. Her book will be published in 2025 with Stanford University Press.

For online attendance join here

Supported by: Lumina Queruntur award (LQ300582201)