Written by anthropologist Elana Resnick, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe is a powerful ethnographic account of the racialized burdens produced by the European Union’s (EU) “greening” initiatives, particularly as they are borne by Romani women employed as street sweepers and, more broadly, by Roma waste workers, collectors, and scavengers. The book carefully grounds the analysis in the historical and social context of Bulgaria’s socialist past and its contemporary liberal transition toward fully embracing the European project. Through her immersive engagement with long-term fieldwork conducted while working alongside Roma women sweepers on the streets of Sofia, the author documents the physically and emotionally punishing conditions under which their labor is performed.
Resnick’s eloquent ethnographic prose captures with great care the multiple registers of racist power that shape these women’s everyday hardships, as articulated and reproduced through practices and discourses of waste management companies and government officials. In fact, one of the book’s major contributions lies not only in its recognition of the racialized and sexualized nature of Roma labor, but also in its attention to the specific racialized positioning and discrimination of women sweepers within the hierarchical power structures of waste management companies.
One of the book’s central achievements is its incisive analysis of the paradoxes embedded in Bulgaria’s pursuit of a “green” capitalist economy, a project framed as a pathway toward Europeanization. Resnick demonstrates masterfully how this environmental and post-socialist transition relies fundamentally on the racialized and gendered labor of Roma waste workers, who are Bulgarian and European citizens, yet treated by the very system that depends on them as disposable, rejected, and fundamentally incompatible with sustainability. In this sense, the same political and economic order that promotes environmental responsibility while depicting Roma communities as unable to meet its standards is deeply reliant on their labor, exposing a core contradiction at the heart of contemporary sustainability efforts.
The book is composed of an introduction, followed by five chapters and a substantial conclusion, each focusing on a particular aspect of Roma sweepers’ lives and their relationship with the racialized waste management and greening industry and, more broadly, on the racial social hierarchies in Bulgaria today. The first chapter, “Waste and Race,” begins by describing how the author gained access to her fieldwork as a contracted street sweeper in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. It also provides a meticulous account of how waste management relies on racialized and sexualized forms of labor exploitation. In particular, it depends on Roma women sweepers’ physically demanding, back-breaking labor, on their emotional toll of humiliation and social suffering, but also on their precarious financial conditions. Many of these women are trapped in multiple predatory loans, rendering their lives even more precarious and expandable. By examining labor hierarchies across different waste management companies, the author illustrates how Roma workers, and especially Roma women sweepers, occupy the lowest echelon of the industry, treated as “discarded things” and “discardable people” (34). The author demonstrates how Bulgaria’s environmental EU sustainability targets are maintained through discriminatory social practices and discourses rooted in anti-Roma racism within a broader context of post-socialist capitalism. These practices confine Roma workers to jobs that are undesirable to white Bulgarians, forming what the author conceptualizes as the “waste-race nexus” (13).
The second chapter, “Recycling,” adds another layer of ethnographic analysis of waste management and recycling in Sofia. The author traces structural transformations in Bulgaria’s waste recycling sector across two historical periods, from socialism to capitalism. Despite the progressive aspirations of Bulgaria’s sustainability goals to reach EU targets, the Roma communities remain positioned at the bottom of the country’s racial social hierarchy. For many Roma women sweepers and other Roma individuals involved in the “greening” system (92), recycling represents both an opportunity for employment and a site of criminalization of their work, particularly in relation to scrap metal collection, referred by some company officials as “stealing waste” (67). The author details how socialist-era waste infrastructures are appropriated by private waste management companies, often eliminating the middleman to increase profits, while maintaining Roma labor in conditions of bare subsistence.
The third chapter, “Surveillance,” examines how the Roma populations are kept at the margins of the Bulgarian society amid the rise of far-right and nationalistic governments that increasingly portray Roma as second-class citizens, both in Bulgaria and across Europe more broadly.
The fourth chapter, “Voting,” describes the mechanisms through which Romani votes are bought, sold, and at times coerced through practices such as physical threats and violence against them. While such practices have been present across the Balkans and eastern Europe for some time now, they contribute to voter suppression and ultimately undermine Roma political representation. Consequently, this perpetuates the status quo and maintains Roma socio-economic marginalization and exclusion from power structures.
In the fifth chapter, “Friendship,” and in the conclusion, the author takes the reader through the emotional highs and lows of bonding and friendship among the Roma women sweepers. Through humor, playful mockery of the author, and ironic engagement with stereotypes surrounding Roma women’s femininity and sexuality, these women claim their place in public spaces. The author fondly and vividly depicts moments of solidarity, friendship, and mutual support among Roma women sweepers, many of whom are the primary breadwinners in their families. Amid dehumanizing labor conditions, deep poverty, ubiquitous racism, and pervasive racial segregation, these women strive to preserve self-respect and dignity. Even as structural violence relegates the Roma communities to the margins of society, they nonetheless continue to imagine and craft alternative ways of living beyond the exploitative logics of racialized sustainability within the liberal order.
While the book offers a rich and compelling analysis, there are two areas where further reflection may serve as productive avenues for future research. The first concerns the positionality of the researcher in the field and how we can explore more explicitly discussions around power relations between the researchers and their interlocutors. In this case, discussions with Roma women sweepers, as well as in the interactions with NGO representatives and ministerial officials, would add another layer to the analysis. Questions of unequal access to knowledge, institutional authority, social capital, material security, and basic access to services, such as the ability to avoid the daily precarity faced by the Roma women, for whom even a hot shower constitutes a luxury, remain relatively implicit. Hence, despite the ethnographer’s humility and deep sympathy for their interlocutors, which are evident throughout the ethnographic accounts, a more reflexive engagement with these asymmetries could further enrich the analytical depth of the ethnographic material.
Second, a more explicit exploration of the author’s own status as an outsider within an already outcast and socially marginalized women’s group could represent another fruitful point of inquiry. This positionality is marked by a form of ambivalent intimacy, at times conveyed through possessive expressions such as “our white American” (167), that coexists with a persistent distance, as the author ultimately remains an outsider to that Roma women’s group. Reflecting more directly on this tension and unresolved positionality could offer valuable insights into the ethical and methodological challenges of ethnographic engagement, particularly when conducting research among communities that are themselves profoundly marginalized, excluded, and segregated. Such reflections would not detract from the book’s strengths, but would rather enhance its contribution to broader debates on reflexivity, power, and responsibility in ethnographic research.
This book constitutes an important contribution to the anthropology of waste and race, and more broadly, to anthropological teaching and research. Profoundly grounded in ethnographic inquiry, it will be useful to scholars across disciplines in social sciences who employ ethnography as a research method, particularly anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, political scientists, urbanists and urban planners, and environmental studies scholars. It will also be highly relevant to undergraduate and graduate students interested in Romani studies, waste management and sustainability, as well as to Romani and non-Romani scholars, artists, and activists engaged in advocacy for Romani rights and anti-discrimination and anti-segregation policies in Bulgaria, eastern Europe, and the European Union more generally.
