Elana Resnick, "Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

New Books Network

Episode: Elana Resnick, "Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Host: Dragana Pruvulovic
Guest: Elana Resnik
Air Date: July 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features a rich ethnographic discussion with anthropologist Elana Resnik about her book Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe. The conversation explores how environmental policies in post-socialist Bulgaria—especially those related to EU accession—intersect with racialized labor and the socio-political realities of the Romani community. Through her multisited fieldwork, including sweeping streets alongside Romani women, Resnik unpacks “racial sustainability,” the “waste race nexus,” state surveillance, and forms of resistance and solidarity situated in everyday life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Context and Resnik’s Path to the Research (01:30 – 06:55)

• Elana Resnik’s engagement with Romani issues began in 2003, rooted in activism for human rights and social justice.
• Initial interest: The educational segregation of Romani children in Eastern Europe; impact of language and state policies.
• Chose Bulgaria because of Romani-run NGOs and its pivotal moment before EU accession, following a severe 1990s economic crisis.
• Bulgaria’s efforts for EU accession brought together disparate pressures, especially the Copenhagen Criteria: requiring legal reform, anti-corruption measures, environmental improvements, and minority inclusion—elements sometimes at odds in practice.

Notable Quote:
“My book is basically the product of [my Romani friends’] intellectual impact on me over these decades.” (Elana Resnik, 04:42)

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2. Racial Sustainability: Concept and Central Argument (06:55 – 10:09)

• “Racial sustainability”: Resnik’s term for the way environmental projects depend on, and perpetuate, systems of racialized labor and disposability—particularly the exploitation of Romani workers for meeting EU environmental mandates.
• Multiscalar ethnography: Resnik engaged at multiple levels, from street sweepers (doing eleven months’ fieldwork with 42 Romani women), to waste company CEOs and EU consultants.
• Inspiration for the concept came directly from fieldwork and interlocutors, not only theory.
• Links between racial capitalism and the European context, positioning the Roma as among Europe’s first systematically racialized populations.

Notable Quote:
“My Romani friends and colleagues recognized that so called progressive environmental mandates... rely on their racialized disposability and could never be achieved without their labor.” (Elana Resnik, 08:52)

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3. The Waste Race Nexus: Materializing Race through Waste (10:09 – 15:01)

• “Waste race nexus”: A framework for understanding how race operates through material systems—waste collection and management are sites where Roma are both made visible and surveilled.
• Irony: Bulgaria claims it cannot be racist because its own European-ness is contested, yet anti-Roma racism is persistent and foundational.
• Historical roots: Waste work provided both relatively good pay and functioned as a tool for state surveillance of Roma under socialism.
• Contemporary transformation: Wages for waste workers have stagnated or worsened; the sector remains deeply racialized, serving both community and state needs, yet reinforcing inequalities and dehumanization.

Notable Quote:
“Roma are seen and treated as social waste... waste and waste labor are racialized, which in turn legitimizes Roma dehumanization.” (Elana Resnik, 11:28)

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4. State Surveillance, NGO Politics, and Political Refusal (16:48 – 23:57)

• Surveillance transitions: From overt state monitoring under socialism to subtler (but still pervasive) forms in the EU period, often repackaged as “reintegration.”
• NGO crisis: EU accession changed funding flows, weakening Romani-run organizations, especially as funds became dependent on increasingly right-wing national governments.
• Memorable incident (2011): At an EU conference, Romani activists were inadvertently given street cleaner vests as swag—activists responded with T-shirts reading “Europe, Stop Funding Roma Exclusion.”
• Deep politics of refusal: Many Roma refuse to vote or participate in official channels, seeing these mechanisms as fundamentally broken or co-opted.

Notable Moment:
The “yellow vest conference” (19:16–22:15): Romani activists collectively recognize and reject the way EU projects continue to racialize and marginalize them, using subversive humor and pointed protest.

Notable Quote:
“If you strike, then there would be no one to clean these streets and effectively Bulgaria would not be able to exist without you. So Roma work keeps Bulgaria European.” (Elana Resnik, 17:44)

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5. Nesto Drugo—Friendship, Solidarity, and Everyday Resistance (23:57 – 29:20)

• “Nesto Drugo” (“something else”): The collective, hopeful ambiance fostered by Romani women in their moments together outside work and surveillance.
• A key chapter features International Women’s Day parties, where sweepers resist both familial and municipal demands, constructing spaces of laughter, joy, and mutual support.
• Political action happens outside formal structures—not only protest, but in daily mutual care and relationality, grounded in survival and possibility.

Notable Quote:
“For one night we get to hold cocktails instead of brooms.” (Romani Women, as described by Elana Resnik, 25:08)

• The chapter resists framing these moments as shallow respite; rather, they are real and vital forms of collective life and quiet resistance.

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6. Ethnographic Method and Positionality (29:20 – 34:33)

• Resnik’s fieldwork was deeply immersive—she was hired as a street sweeper to ethically engage with the community, experiencing firsthand the racialization and surveillance.
• Methodological rigor: Respect for code-switching practices, only quoting from Bulgarian to honor the intent of speech, careful about language and representation.
• Reflections on being perceived as “too white” for waste work, which illuminated how race and labor intersected on the ground.
• Boundaries: Negotiating being an ethnographer, friend, and colleague; recognizing both privilege and limits of understanding.

Notable Quote:
“They would introduce me as, she’s our American, she says she’s not a spy, and she could take a joke.” (Elana Resnik, 32:53)

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7. New and Ongoing Projects (34:33 – 39:14)

• Current work: A book and film (co-directed with Raina Teneva) on nuclear power, labor, and river ecologies along the Danube, focusing on women who worked on the unfinished Belene nuclear plant.
• Continuous themes: Surveillance—rethinking socialist surveillance through a racial lens, inspired by Black and feminist studies.
• Future research: Urban water access and legal pluralism in Sofia, examining how different communities (including Roma and affluent neighborhoods) navigate and regulate water resources.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments with Timestamps

• “My book is basically the product of their intellectual impact on me over these decades.” (Elana Resnik, 04:42)
• “Environmental sustainability... is deeply racialized because of how environmental sustainability also links up with global capitalist flows and forces like those coming in from the European Union.” (Elana Resnik, 09:35)
• “Roma are seen and treated as social waste... waste and waste labor are racialized, which in turn legitimizes Roma dehumanization.” (Elana Resnik, 11:28)
• “You see us as street cleaners, because that is the vest that all street cleaners in Bulgaria are mandated to wear.” (Elana Resnik describing the conference incident, 20:33)
• “For one night we get to hold cocktails instead of brooms.” (Romani Women, as described by Elana Resnik, 25:08)
• “They would introduce me as, she’s our American, she says she’s not a spy, and she could take a joke.” (Elana Resnik, 32:53)

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In Summary

This episode investigates how environmentalist reforms in Bulgaria, under EU pressures, are bound up with deep-seated structures of racial capitalist exploitation, especially targeting the Roma community. Resnik’s unique methodology—combining archival research with participatory fieldwork—unearths the lived realities and micro-political resistances of Romani women waste workers. Along the way, listeners are introduced to innovative concepts (“racial sustainability,” “waste race nexus,” “nesto drugo”), vivid ethnographic description, and a sharp critique of how well-meaning sustainability agendas can reinscribe old hierarchies. The episode concludes with Resnik outlining exciting new research on nuclear energy, surveillance, and water politics, promising further intersections of labor, race, and environment.

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Transcript

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[Dragana Pruvulovic]

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to New Books Network. My name is Dragana Pruvulovic and today I'm speaking with Elana Resnik, a scholar of anthropology, about her new book which came out in 2025 at Stanford University Press. The title is Refusing Sustainability, Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe. So, Alana, thank you for being on the show today.

[Elana Resnik]

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

[Dragana Pruvulovic]

So, to begin, could you help situate listeners in the post socialist Bulgarian context and in doing so also tell us a little bit about yourself. What drew you to this research?

[Elana Resnik]

Sure. I came to this research in 2003 when I was an undergraduate at Haverford College. I came to the project through my activism and my commitments to human rights and social justice. So at the time I was taking a class on endangered languages at Swarthmore College and I was interested in the role of Romani language in public schools in Eastern Europe. And I was interested in how different states were using the fact that Roma have a mother tongue. That was for them at the time, unrecognizable and often called, and I put it in quotes, jargon. They were using that fact to then place young Romani students into special schools, effectively moving them out of the mainstream public school system. Which had long lasting and intergenerational effects. At the time, there was a grant I was eligible for, and I applied for it in 2003. I was interested in working with Roma issues more generally in Eastern Europe. And at the time, in my kind of naive undergraduate way, I sent a query on a listserv and received dozens of responses. They were from Romani organizations across Europe, and I knew that I wanted to volunteer at a Romany run organization. And I went through all of these responses, and I found one query or one answer to my query that stuck out. It was an organization that was coordinating educational desegregation programs across Bulgaria, run by three Romani activists who all spoke English, and the executive director was a Roma woman. And so based on that, I chose Bulgaria. And I went to Bulgaria in 2003 to volunteer at this organization. And I have remained in very close touch with two of the three founding members of that ngo. And they're my closest friends, not just in Bulgaria, but we joke that my book is basically the product of their intellectual impact on me over these decades. They inspired me to go to grad school, write the book, and then have continually listened to me and engaged it as I've, you know, wrote this project in many ways. And they were the last readers before it went to press. So I came to Bulgaria in 2003. I didn't know what to expect, but it. It captivated me because it was a time of so much excitement. It was four years before Bulgaria was set to join the European Union in 2007, and the country had recently emerged from its mid-1990s massive economic and economic crisis based on mass inflation. So that was the time, you know, we often have these, like in America, these cold, warm, you know, kind of images of Eastern Europeans standing on breadlines during communism. But in Bulgaria, that actually happened in the mid-90s. So the currency was devalued so rapidly and at such an extreme rate that the mid-1990s was the period where a lot of Bulgarians say that they couldn't afford bread, they couldn't afford food. So I came in 2003, just not that long after that. And sort of this really pivotal moment where Bulgaria is out of its economic crisis and preparing for European Union accession. And I remember, you know, that summer getting lost all the time because I would use these printed out MapQuest maps of the streets in Sofia, and. And I would show them to people on the bus, like, this is where I live. How do I get there? I didn't speak any Bulgarian at the time, and they couldn't understand what I was saying because most of the elderly population was still using the old communist era names for the streets. So it was this real kind of transitional moment where it's both post socialist, it's also recognizing that it's becoming European and why do people do in that kind of interseas. So I started to continue my work working on Roma issues as I went through grad school and I reflected back on that 2003 year and I realized it was a really important year for my project because it was the moment where Bulgaria had to comply with EU Copenhagen criteria to join the European Union, which means you have to do a set of things, including reducing corruption, so legal changes to the legal system, environmental conservation. But it also was about the inclusion of minorities like the Roma into all facets of life. So it was a human rights agenda as well. But what this meant in practice was that certain criteria were at direct odds with others. So in order to meet pre accession mandates for things like environmental sustainability, Bulgaria ends up relying on its tried and true underpaid racialized labor sector for waste collectors, which are Roma. Like, I'm happy to get into why that is. There's a long historical reason for that, but at the same time, they're supposed to be including Roma into a much more open labor market. So you have these Copenhagen criteria that Bulgaria has to meet, and the way that they're meeting them are coming at direct odds. And that's the paradox that really triggered me to write this book was how does Bulgaria navigate its EU accession through these multiple avenues which are coming into contradiction.

[Dragana Pruvulovic]

Perfect, thank you. So, early in the book you introduced the concept of racial sustainability. Could you explain what you mean by that and how it helps frame the book's central argument?

[Elana Resnik]

So, as I mentioned, Bulgaria is caught in between these Copenhagen criteria where they're forced to comply with these EU regulations, but they're on their own for how they do so. And there's some financial measures done to help Bulgaria, but Bulgaria is effectively having to meet these criteria on its own terms. So what it does is it relies on this racialized labor, often of Romani women, to clean city streets, which is one of the ways in which Bulgaria can meet its criteria for things like urban cleanliness and sustainability. What I started to look at in the book was how the very kind of up and down, like looking up and looking down, practices of how this happens. So what this means is working with, I worked with street sweepers, I swapped on a team of 42 Roma women for 11 months. It also means that I interviewed waste company CEOs. I met with consultants coming in from Brussels talking about how Bulgaria can meet its EU sustainability initiatives. And I interned in the Ministry of the Environment and Water. So I was trying to look at this multiscaler approach. I was creating a multiscaler approach to waste management, environmental sustainability, but with a real focus on the labor that gets it done. I learned over time that my Romani friends and colleagues recognized that so called progressive environmental mandates for things like reduced landfill waste and recycling rely on their racialized disposability and could never be achieved without their labor. So this was not an analysis I was making from the University of Michigan. It was actually one that was emerging from my interlocutors in the field. So I started to think about how I, how can I articulate that for the audience of the book? And I realized that a lot of theories on racial capitalism are actually drawing on the racialization of Roma themselves. So this is not something that I've like imposed. But I'm looking, I'm looking at the work of Cedric Robinson of Robin E. Kelly, who are talking about how Roma in many ways were the first racialized population in Europe. That then helps Europe kind of figure out how to, how they deal with colonialism, how racialization emerges within a colonial project. So drawing on theories of racial capitalism, especially the post socialist particularities, I call this phenomenon racial sustainability to show how environmental projects both depend on and generate racialized power. And so there's work on racial capitalism that says all capitalism is racial capitalism. This is not some kind of outlier. If you take capitalism to its logical conclusion and look at its presuppositions, it's always racialized. And I'm trying to make not the same argument, but I'm thinking with that kind of force when I'm thinking of racial sustainability. That environmental sustainability in many places and in many ways is deeply racialized because of how environmental sustainability also links up with global capitalist flow blows and forces like those coming in from the European Union.

[Dragana Pruvulovic]

Great, thank you. So Eastern Europe and the Balkans have a complicated relationship to race, as you point out. There's often a narrative that, you know, we can't be racist because we ourselves are not fully considered European. Yet that same narrative frequently ignores anti Roma racism. So how did this contradiction emerge and how does it connect to what you call the waste nexus? The waste race nexus.

[Elana Resnik]

So the waste race nexus is my way of thinking about how race issues in the world become often manifested through material processes like those of waste management, waste collection, waste processing. So In Eastern Europe. I found it to be particularly useful because of exactly what you discuss as this narrative. We cannot be racist because we are not considered fully European. And and yet that narrative faces this anti Roma racism. What is really important then, and what was part of my political project of this book was to trace the materializations of how race manifests so that you can no longer say, I didn't want to keep getting into the fight. Is race a salient concept in Eastern Europe and the best way to get out of that kind of matrix or that, you know, this kind of debate is to say, well, let's look at how race becomes material. And one of those ways is, is through how we see waste being processed. It's not the only way, it's just the way that I focused on. So the waste race Nestus explains the conditions that so many Roma analyzed to me as what they said was no life. Nyama jivot. Throughout Europe, Roma are seen and treated as social waste. And waste and waste labor are racialized, which in turn works to legitimize Roma dehumanization. And it's really important to call attention to this because in, by naming it, it in fact has the power potentially to denaturalize it. Because there's often this discussion, oh, look, Relma have always been in this position. They've always been waste collectors. And what I'm looking at is actually, no, this is a historically contingent process that is then buttressed and made actually materially relevant by European Union mandate. So it's a long historical process that then becomes reinvigorated again under the guise of the Copenhagen criteria. And I see this process as the foundation of the waste race nexus. In this nexus, discarded things and people categorized as so called discardable come to constitute each other within the progressivist logics of EU environmental sustainability. And so what the book does is it really tries to show this as a long project. So I look at the history of waste management in Bulgaria combined with an analysis of the state security archives, and I look at how waste management in many ways served as a surveillance site for how Roma during state socialism could be seen, put on public streets and then surveyed so as not to allow them to collectivize and rise up against the state, which is one of the big fears that I saw coming up over and over again in the state socialist archives. There was often a fear that the Roma would become like the Turks and be able to organize against the state in significant ways. So waste work was both about allowing Roma allowing, and I put that in quotes into a waste sector, into a labor sector than a lot of people didn't want to do. It was dirty, it was hot, but it was more relatively high paid than it is now. While at the same time the state had an incentive to keep them in that labor sector because it put them in public space, it put them in uniforms and and it allowed an ease of surveillance of Romani people. Now looking at how that waste race nexus changes over time is also important because it has a particular political economy. When I look into the archives of the state socialist cleaning company Chisto Tah, I looked at the salaries and the salaries of these street sweepers was not that far off from their bosses who were sitting in offices or as accountants, as low level managers for the com for the state company. But in the post socialist and EU period, this work is minimum wage. And there's the gap between the workers like the sweepers that I work with and management staff who are nearly 100% non Romany white Bulgarians has that gap. Wage gap has increased significantly. So the labor in many ways has stayed the same. Um, it's changing also in conjunction with changing discard and consumption patterns. So if anything the labor has gotten harder while at the same time it's being paid relatively less.

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[Dragana Pruvulovic]

terms One of the things I found particularly compelling in the book is the way you trace forms of state surveillance and violence from socialism through to the post EU accession period, where they often reappear through the language of quote unquote reintegration. At the same time, you discussed an important moment of political refusal at an EU organized event. Can you tell the listeners more about forms of political action adopted by the Bulgarian Roma community?

[Elana Resnik]

So, as I said, I started this project not as someone interested in waste management or environmentalism, but it was very much for me a project of Romani politics. And I remember in one of the first kind of moments of my field work, I was asking one of my main interlocutors, where are Roma politics? Why aren't Roma rising up? And when I was sweeping streets, I would ask my colleagues, why aren't you striking? If you strike, then there would be no one to clean these streets and effectively Bulgaria would not be able to exist without you. So Roma work keeps Bulgaria European. So it's one of the ongoing kind of tropes of the book is both at the micro level, when Roma women are sweeping city streets and they're complying with urban cleanliness standards that are both formalized and informalized. There's both this kind of aesthetic sensibility of what a European capital should be that's on paper, but it's also in the minds of citizens and inspectors of what it should look like. But there's also particular regulations. And then for waste collectors in Bulgaria, the word is klushari. They're collect. Those are the people that we might often call scavengers. I don't like the term. Or informal collectors. And they're the ones who are collecting paper, metal, cardboard, those sorts of things. And they're actually when they are collecting waste from dumb cities, you know, dumpsters, these garbage bins on city streets, they're doing seven. They're collecting 70% of all recyclable waste that then gets processed. And those numbers are sent to the Bulgarian Ministry of the Environment, which are then sent to the EU to say, hey, we've complied with, with your packaging recycling measures. At the same time, we've reduced the landfill waste amount by this amount. And if you don't meet these standards, Bulgaria would be having massive sanctions. So it's effectively Romani bodies, Romani people, that are keeping Bulgaria both esthetically and logistically European. So I look at that as the important kind of node from which we can think about where are Romani politics? So why aren't Roma striking if they're that critical to the system and think about the political power that they might have? And so I trace. That's the question that really runs through the book. And I look at all of these moments where Romani solidarities, Romani collectivities and Romani political organizing may not look like what we think it might from the perspective of, you know, the United States in 2025 or 26. So I look at there's these traditional kind of modes of politics that we think of in terms of democracies, voting, NGOs, and I look at how they fail. So there's a chapter in the book about why so many Roma refused to vote altogether. And it's not that they don't care. It's about a deep caring and a deep politics of refusal. Why do Romani NGOs not work? And I look at how the changing funding structures from the European Union, from the days when I began the project in 2003, where you had direct donor funding coming in from Western European countries, from George Soros and from the European Union itself, then gets transferred after EU accession to become structural funds which have to be funneled down through increasingly right wing national governments. So when you're a Roma NGO and you're reliant on the national government, which is becoming increasing, increasingly right wing, you have much less availability to funds to then help your community. And I talk about this moment in 2011 where there's this big conference at the Main Sheraton Hotel in Sofia, Bulgaria, and they invite all of these NGO leaders. It's sort of a Roma intelligentsia, Roma activists being coalesced in one place under the guise of making a difference in life. There's this slogan and inside the room, EU organizers from Brussels hand out these swag bags. And inside is a vest, and it's a yellow vest that they Give everybody. And everybody opens it in the room. They're all aroma. They put it on and they say, oh, I see how you see us, Europe. You see us as street cleaners, because that is the vest that all street cleaners in Bulgaria are mandated to wear. This is a complete misfire. It's not intentional on the EU's part. I talked to them and I said, why did you give people this vest? You're interpolating them as a room of Roma's street sweepers. And they said, actually we just did it because in Western Europe you have to keep this in your car in case of an accident. And this is the EU regulation, is you have to have this vest in the, in the trunk of your car. So we thought it would be nice with our slogan on the back. And it was a complete misfire. So what happens is there's both these unintentional misfires of how EU policy totally ends up racializing Roma populations and Romani activists. But there's also more nefarious kinds of what one of my interlocutors calls cutting the wings of the Roma social movement. So what happened in 2003? All of this excitement is then dwindled. And actually, you know, some people said it dies after EU accession when all of these NGOs that were so excited for change can no longer exist. They can no longer get funding. So at this conference, as people are putting on their yellow vests, there's a group of Romani activists, former NGO leaders, who actually say, come in with T shirts that say, Europe, Stop funding Roma exclusion. Because they ultimately say these kinds of democratic models of NGO politics don't work. So instead, just stop giving us the money altogether. And you know what you'll see? You'll see that nothing changes because they don't want to be the so called beneficiaries of money that they never see and then are blamed for not using. Well, so this was the beginning of this era, they call it in the Roma kind of sector, the reign of terror, where what happens is the, the government starts investigating Romani NGOs saying, Look, we gave you all of this money and you didn't do anything with it. Show us your bank accounts. And in the end, all of the Germany leaders are imprisoned, many are dying, both slow and fast, deaths, strokes, this sort of thing. And they don't find that anybody is actually committing fraud. But at the same time, they're delegitimizing this Roma NGO sector. So in the wake of that, where do Roma find political action and solidarity? And that's Where I start to talk about how it may come through kinds of friendships and work solidarities like those among street sweepers in Bulgaria, where it's not formalized. It may not look like politics, but it is a kind of political engagement on its own terms. Because fundamentally, politics is about time together and the ability to organize and collectivize.

[Dragana Pruvulovic]

I was especially struck by the concept of nesto druga or something else. So the ways that people create lives and futures within conditions of racial sustainability. And the chapter on friendship, particularly among women, captures these life worlds in such a vivid and often really funny way. Could you tell listeners more about that chapter and what you observed?

[Elana Resnik]

Thank you. So that that chapter comes after these chapters. Chapters three and four are about political protests, the vests at the conference, why Roma in so many communities refuse to vote, why traditional democratic politics fail. And then where are we left in the wake of that failure or in the midst of that failure? Because that failure is ongoing, as Roma are keeping. They're keeping prosecuted for the misuse of funds that they never got in the first place. And so what's happening outside of the conference hall of the Sheraton Hotel? What's happening on the street, in the neighborhood? And so in that chapter, I really focus on the kinds of friendship and the political, the seeds of political engagement that are happening among Romani women who are sweeping streets. They're spending time together, which is so unique in this day and age, to spend eight hours a day together on the street outside of the purview of both their families that need them for all the things, you know, their moms, their grandparents, their aunts, their uncles. They're often the sole income earners and providers from huge extended families. And at the same time, they're constantly skirting surveillance. They're being surveyed by the municipality as their municipal inspectors. They're being surveyed by their own bosses. They're being surveyed by the boss's bosses, both on foot and in cars. And they're able to create these kind of hidden moments of engagement where they're talking about politics, they're talking about social change, they're talking about what might be possible. And it's not in the practical sense of like, we're going to do some community organizing, we're going door to door, we're going to do this kind of work in an ABCD kind of way. But they're sitting around talking about, like, you know, we didn't get paid for three weeks. What can we do? We know we can't strike because we know we're Highly replaceable. So they're very aware that for everyone working in a street sweeping job, despite it being minimum wage, there's tens, if not dozens of people who want those positions. They're contracted positions, they come with particular benefits and they're not easy to get. So nobody wants to risk their job, their so called job security with that. And at the same time they know that it's not right that they're living in an EU country where they should be paid according to labor laws. So I'm looking at how the time spent together both allows for those conversations, but also allows for something else. And so that's where I get to this question of Nestro Drugo. I had written in a Public culture article, I had defined it as anything else. And then in the book I redefined it as something else. And that was based on some conversations with colleagues and my going over my field notes again. But there's this moment in chapter five, it's March 8th, it's International Women's Day. All of the sweepers say for one night we get to hold cocktails instead of brooms. And they go out and they party. And they're very kind of sweet. I mean, they're all moms, they have these fruity like vodka drinks they mix with like a pa, tons of soda. And they're going out and they're just so happy to be out, out of uniform, wearing nail polish and jewelry and clothes, you know, clothes that aren't their uniform. And outside of the surveillance of their bosses and the demands of their families. And they create this kind of effervescence. And the chapter is trying to trace what, how do we think of what that is, that felt sense of like something is possible and it's not. I mean, this is the chapter that I think I struggled with the most because I'm trying not to say this is some sort of empty or vapid kind of partying. That's not what it is at all. But it's the sense that there that we can live this hard life, that they can live that hard life and they can be in those daily circumstances and yet have these moments of respite that make it worthwhile, in which their friendship and their collective relationalities are celebrated. And what does that do? What does that enable? What does that provide? And it doesn't end with an answer. It ends with this look. They're always kind of referring to this something else that maybe together we can do something else. We don't know what it is. We don't know how permanent or temporary it might be, but it's ways to create these kinds of small, temporary, resistive pleasures in the midst of all of the. The state sanctioned violence and neglect and surveillance that they deal with every day. So I say rather than push for state interventions, they draw a neighborhood solidaries to support one each other's humanity, respect and survival. And in it's both about survival, but it's also beyond that. It's something else. And I was trying to capture that feeling that I think a lot of us can recognize. And that's how I put it into words within, you know, what the. How they're calling it in Bulgarian.

[Dragana Pruvulovic]

Fascinating. Thank you for that. So as an ethnographer, I was really struck by the level of personal investment you brought to your field work, including working as a street sweeper and dumpster diving alongside your interlocutors. Could you tell the listeners more about your methodological approach, the challenges you encountered in the field, and how you thought through your own positionality? Thank you.

[Elana Resnik]

This is so critical to ethnography, and I'm always happy to talk about this. This was a really hard project ethically for me to wrap my mind around. So from the very start, when I was in 2007, it was my first summer after I started grad school, and I thought, I'm going back to work at these NGOs that I was interested in and working at in 2003 to come to Bulgaria the summer after they joined the eu. And all of that NGO sector is now defunded and I had no field site anymore. So that was the beginning of this project is I'm sitting on city streets kind of figuring out like, where. And always my question is like, where is Roma politics? And I see these women sweeping, speaking Romanes. And I said, oh, there's these collective groups of Roma women. They're just not in NGO offices, they're on city streets. And that's really how the project started was in that kind of moment of NGO defunding and my awareness or coming to kind of realization of where Roma collectivities might lie. And I started to ask the sweepers on the street, can I talk to you? Like, what's going on here? Because it was clearly a racialized labor sector. And they would say, we want to talk to you, but we can't because our bosses are watching. And that would happen repeatedly. So I realized that the most ethical thing I could do was to actually get the boss to hire me because I couldn't compromise, like their work and their livelihood by talking to them. While they're on the job. And I'm just, you know, some grad student with a notebook. So I ended up for. This was 2007, and I went to Bulgaria every summer until I moved there in 2010. And I worked repeatedly asking everyone I knew, do you know anyone who works in the waste sector? Do you know anyone who works for one of these cleaning companies? And I would. I went to the International Waste Expo conference, and I went to one of the booths for one of these waste companies, and I said, I want to sweep streets. And they laughed and they said, where's the candid camera? You're too white for this job. And I started to realize that, like, not only my American ness, but my white Americanness was remarked upon in particular ways. That helps me see the very particularities of how the work was racialized. It's not just racialized as non. You know, racialization happens in terms of whiteness and non whiteness, but it was racialized in a particular way. And I started to traced that. And over time, I had a contact at one of these waste companies that hired me, knowing I was a PhD student writing about this. And he put me on a team. And so I worked until they fired me 11 months later. But that was the ethics of it. It was. Everybody knew what I was doing, they knew I was writing. They used to say, she writes the book of how much we suffer. So for a long time, they would give me the litanies of complaints, ask me to take pictures of the wounds that they would incur from the job. And then over a while, they would just. They would introduce me as, she's our American, she says she's not a spy, and she could take a joke. And that was kind of like how I was taken was. I added a little bit of, I think, interest to these. You know, in many ways, it's a monotonous job. But I was very. I was always clear. I was really upfront with what I was doing. And all. Everyone who's involved in the project was always listening to my own thoughts on it. So, you know, we're spending hours together. And so I also take this ethical stance on language where I. I understood most of what they were talking about in Romanese, but I only write down what was spoken in Bulgarian because I noticed over time that there was code switching happening. So a lot of the street sweepers would want to. They would speak and they wouldn't care if I was involved. But when they were saying something in Bulgarian, it was often very pointed and want. They wanted me to write that down. So I tried to both balance this immersive ethnographic experience with the ethics of what to write and what not to write when your interlocutors are also your friends and you're spending so much time together that I think there's times at which the boundaries between ethnographer, friend and colleague get blurred. And I try to really honor that when I'm writing the book. And I mean, and I think the other thing is, it was the first time I was often misrecognized as a really white Roma when I was sweeping streets when I wasn't speaking. And there's this colorization that happens among Roma workers. So it allowed my own positionality was always front and center, whether or not I wanted it to be. But it was also a tool for understanding how race functions while also understanding the limits of my knowledge. Right. I'm not Bulgarian, I'm not Roma, and I'm immersed. You know, I start the book saying, like, I'm immersed in the structures of global white supremacy that I talk about and how do I navigate that, while also, you know, not trying to, you know, so called, go native while doing field work, but realizing that that kind of research was actually the more ethical stance from the surveillance point of view.

[Dragana Pruvulovic]

Well, we've taken up a lot of your time. I'd like to ask you a final question, which is, what are you working on now?

[Elana Resnik]

Thanks so much. I'm actually very excited to transition to this new project that I've been working on actually since 2016. I have this new project, and then I'm also working on some projects related to the book. So my new work is on nuclear power and decommissioning in Europe along the Danube River. I have a film project. It's my first film that dovetails with a book I'm writing about nuclear power. The film I'm co directing with Bulgarian media artist Raina Teneva. And the film is about four women who basically tested the construction materials to build Bulgaria's second nuclear power plant, the Belen Nuclear Power plant site. And it was a project that had been in the works since the 60s. And then these women coalesced in the late 80s to build the plant that was then halted in 1989, and they were brought back together again. Every time there was a plan to restart the plant, which kept going through the 90s and the 2000s with its final decision not to start the Belen nuclear power plant in 2023. And the project traces the friendship and the collaborations of these Four women living in Bella Nae who were in charge of the very kind of foundation of what was to become Bulgaria's second nuclear power plant site. So it's the story of geopolitics, of Cold War nuclear power, politics of Danube river preservation through the lens of the four women. And the book that I'm writing that intersects with the film project is about the relationship of this Belen nuclear power site to the working Kozlodui nuclear power plant, which during socialism, supplied 40% of Bulgaria's energy and is now supplying about one third. And it's now. It was in the process of decommissioning some of its reactors and is now in a phase of new. So I'm looking at the changing politics and practices and environmentalisms of nuclear power, from socialism to this kind of Green Europe movement that's happening now. And at the same time, I'm very interested in these sites because they sit along the Danube River. So I'm looking at nuclear river ecologies, intersections, and how people are relating to all of this, often through the lens of labor. So that's really kind of the link between the first project and this project. And at the same time, I'm working on an article now about surveillance specifically, kind of rethinking a lot of analyses of socialism that were founded on how the state. State surveyed its populations, the securitization of socialism. And so I'm looking at these canonical works about surveillance during socialism and trying them to put them in discussion with more contemporary work coming out of black studies and feminist studies on racializing surveillance, to rethink how state socialist surveillance treated Roma people in particular. So it's a project that really takes the surveillance thread of the book into a more kind of theoretical frame by rethinking state socialist surveillance through a racial frame. And then I have another project that takes the last chapter of the book, which was about water and urban water consumption. And it looks at how different groups access urban water in Sofia, Bulgaria, in ways that actually are linked. So looking at how, you know, people in these semi regulated Roman neighborhoods are accessing water that they may or may not have legal access to according to the state, but also different, different kind of regulations on water access and how that relates to these very affluent mountain communities around Vitusha Mountain in Bulgaria, and how they're also accessing water in. In ways that are determined. Their legality is often fungible and talked about in particular ways. So I'm looking at the regulations of water access and how they change and how they're perceived differently related to who's doing the accessing of water.

[Dragana Pruvulovic]

Super exciting and I really look forward to reading your future work. So thank you so much for being on the show today.

[Elana Resnik]

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It was great.

[Dragana Pruvulovic]

So that was Ilana Resnick talking to us about her new book out from Stanford University Press 2025, refusing sustainability, race, and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe.

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