Nothing Ever Perishes: Waste, Race, and Transformation in an Expanding European Union.

Abstract

Premised on the fact that nothing ever does actually perish, this manuscript is an analysis of transformation, shaped through a variety of substances, objects, temporalities, qualities, metaphors, and phenomenological ways of being in the world—and being perceived in the world. I examine material objects undergoing various kinds of transformations and the people involved in those material metamorphoses, paying close attention to the intersections of humans and non-human objects in processes of change, stasis, temporal movement, and spatial organization. My research centers on the Roma minority in Bulgaria, markedly overrepresented in the waste labor sector, which has come to occupy the role of Europe’s “social waste.” I denaturalize links between Roma and trash by focusing on waste in its discursive, metaphorical, historical, and material dimensions. I ask the simple and enduring question: how does change happen? Using waste as the conceptual connector, I explore transformation on three planes, which move in and out of each other. First, I look at transformation —of tangible things categorized as waste —into other categories of material, into money, into heat, into energy. Second, I look at waste transformations over time. I explore how Bulgaria changed both in terms of European Union harmonization procedures and reactive measures to those policies, from the socialist period through 2014. Third, I trace the possibilities of—and hindrances to—transformations of the humans dealing with waste. I see these three kinds of transformation—material, temporal, social—as ongoing projects in planar, non-hierarchical relation with each other. I highlight how material transformations of things (i.e. soda cans into money, trash bags into municipal heat) take shape as part of human-material processes that refuse, reject, and inhibit the changing social positions of those involved in such waste practices. Ultimately, I show that the utopian project of Europeanization—enmeshed within larger processes of electoral mobilization, capitalist development, neoliberal work regimes, environmental degradation, and unequal distributions of wealth and infrastructural access—is predicated on the categorical linkages of humans and things (i.e. waste and social trash) but, in practice, puts into stark relief differentials for transformation between humans and non-human objects.