Chapter Three | Rethinking sustainable development practice: from intervention to reparation | Manisha Anantharaman and Jennifer L. Tucker

PROJECT SUMMARY

Development practice has historically framed the majority of the world as “problem places” needing intervention (Roy et al., 2016). This discourse claims the power to define the boundaries of what counts as progress, civilization and development, while also creating an imagined binary between which people—from where—are empowered to act, and which people and places are targeted for improvement. These binaries between agents of change and recipients of development reflect and exacerbate race, class and gendered hierarchies and oppressions. Couched in the language of benevolent intervention, these normative and discursive claims obscure how development’s focus on economic growth has historically translated into projects of opening up space for economic growth and capital accumulation, too often at the expense of local communities and environments. This “interventionist mindset” recalls what Paulo Freire calls “anti-dialogical action” (Freire, 2000), relying on forms of knowledge invested in reproducing racial and imperial hierarchies of power (see also Kolden, this book).

Indeed, theorists of racial capitalism show how the devaluation of non-white bodies, as well as the knowledge and experiences they hold, is key to both capitalism and inequality (Pulido, 2017). Reflecting the enduring but often unacknowledged salience of the white savior complex, interventionist mindsets are reproduced and reaffirmed throughout the dominant culture curriculum, from the way in which histories are presented to the mapping of the roles of different actors in processes of social change. The interventionist mindset also renders political problems as technical ones – that is, beyond the bounds of public debate (Li, 2007), as it also treats poor people as passive recipients of aid rather than agents of change. Moving away from an interventionist mindset requires both an analysis of the root causes of environmental and social injustices and an alternative ethic to guide engagement and practice, one that emphasizes mutual vulnerability and obligation.

Drawing on a 2020 perspective piece (Tucker and Anantharaman, 2020), this chapter will consider how critically examining informal waste work can help students rethink sustainable development practice, moving from intervention to reparation. By teaching students to frame sustainable development practice in new ways, we hope to shift the field of development practice vis-à-vis informal economies from an interventionist, deficit-based approach to one that acts upon the core drivers producing poverty and unsustainability. Our learning activities, like this chapter, explore how the material forces reproducing inequality articulate with assumption-laden narratives about progress and development. It also calls for an ethic of action sufficiently robust, truthful and hopeful to move us toward more just futures.

We argue that the problem is not a gap in knowledge about poverty and sustainability, but rather the inadequate uptake of critical and community-based research by policymakers and development practitioners. As such, we emphasize critical literature, social movement expertise and the knowledge produced by workers’ organizations. Moreover, we indicate the necessity of development researchers and practitioners engaging in self-conscious critique (Giroux, 1983) of their positionality, stakes and obligations in relation to the communities they/we purport to help.

The impetus for this project emerges from our own teaching experiences in which we draw on our fieldwork with informal workers in Bengaluru, India and Ciudad del Este, Paraguay to engage in counter-storytelling (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002) about sustainability, development and urban planning. Counter-storytelling is a pedagogical and activist project forwarded by critical race theorists that questions dominant culture narratives by learning from social movement wisdom and amplifying the voices, perspectives and knowledge of historically marginalized and racialized communities (Solórzano and Yosso, 2001; Yosso, 2005). The modules will support students in countering dominant narratives by thinking critically about commodity chains for recyclable, and about the informal workers whose knowledge and labor are central to their functioning. It provides a framework for moving beyond disempowering analysis of situations of injustice to imagine radical possibilities for doing justice.

The chapter outlines the purpose, activities and assessments of a teaching module built around this case. The independent four-week module can be integrated into a diversity of courses on global environmental politics, global development, development geography, urban planning or affiliated disciplines. It assumes little to no foundational knowledge on economies, and thus can be incorporated into general education classes with some additional scaffolding.

It utilizes project-based and group learning to promote critical thinking and reflection by students about their positionalities in the global political economy of production and consumption. It also introduces students to the philosophy of reparations by situating it in the Black radical tradition’s expansive vision of freedom and justice. By teaching comparative thinking, the module supports students to translate insights from the Black radical tradition into a platform for ethical engagement with informal workers.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

At the end of this learning module, students will be able to:

1. Evaluate the political economy of production and consumption in relation to the global uneven distribution of value, risks and burdens.
2. Recognize the assumptions and worldviews that underlie development intervention into informal waste economies.
3. Identify key differences between the dominant interventionist and an alternative approach to development practice rooted in radical struggles for social, economic and racial equality, like the Black radical tradition.
4. Articulate the role of values and ethics in development and elaborate their own ethic of action.
5. Demonstrate critical self-consciousness about their roles and responsibilities in efforts to “do good” given their positionality and social location in global hierarchies.

SUGGESTED BACKGROUND READINGS

Essential readings are marked with an asterisk.

Problematizing “Sustainable Development” and Poverty Alleviation

• Esquivel, V. (2016). Power and the Sustainable Development Goals: a feminist analysis. Gender & Development, 24(1), 9–23.
• *Gupta, J., & Vegelin, C. (2016). Sustainable Development Goals and inclusive development. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 16(3), 433–448.
• Rai, S. M., Brown, B. D., & Ruwanpura, K. N. (2019). SDG 8: Decent work and economic growth: a gendered analysis. World Development, 113, 368–380.
• *Roy, A., Negrón-Gonzales, G., Opoku-Agyemang, K., & Talwalker, C. (2016). Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World. University of California Press.

Global Political Economy and Unequal Exchange

• *Dauvergne, P. (2010). The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment. MIT Press.
• Dorninger, C., Hornborg, A., Abson, D. J., Von Wehrden, H., Schaffartzik, A., Giljum, S., et al. (2021). Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange: implications for sustainability in the 21st century. Ecological Economics, 179, 106824.
• *Hardoon, D., Fuentes-Nieva, R., & Ayele, S. (2016). An Economy for the 1%: How Privilege and Power in the Economy Drive Extreme Inequality and How This Can Be Stopped. Oxfam International.
• Hickel, J. (2017). The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions. Random House.
• *Patel, R., & Moore, J. W. (2017). A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. University of California Press.
• Sheppard, E. (2012). Trade, globalization and uneven development: entanglements of geographical political economy. Progress in Human Geography, 36(1), 44–71.
• *Wiedmann, T., Lenzen, M., Keyßer, L. T., & Steinberger, J. K. (2020). Scientists’ warning on affluence. Nature Communications, 11(1), 1–10.

Informal Economy

• Banks, N., Lombard, M., & Mitlin, D. (2020). Urban informality as a site of critical analysis. Journal of Development Studies, 56(2), 223–238.
• Chaturvedi, B., Khan, I., Mukherjee, C., Chaturvedi, R., & Varma, A. (2018). Wastepickers: Delhi’s Forgotten Environmentalists? READKONG. https://www.readkong.com/page/2018-wastepickers-delhi -s-forgotten-environmentalists-9822919.
• *Chen, M., & Carré, F. (2020). The Informal Economy Revisited: Examining the Past, Envisioning the Future. Taylor & Francis.
• *Chikarmane, P., & Narayan, L. (2005). Organising the unorganised: a case study of the Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (trade union of waste-pickers). WIEGO.
• *Dias, S. M. (2016). Waste pickers and cities. Environment and Urbanization, 28(2), 375–390.
• Dias, S., & Samson, M. (2016). Informal Economy Monitoring Study Sector Report: Waste Pickers. WIEGO.

Waste Pickers and Informal Economy: Formalization Critiques

• Anantharaman, M. (2014). Networked ecological citizenship, the new middle classes and the provisioning of sustainable waste management in Bangalore, India. Journal of Cleaner Production, 63, 173–183.
• Millar, K. M. (2018). Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump. Duke University Press.
• *O’Hare, P. (2020). “We looked after people better when we were informal”: the “quasi-formalisation” of Montevideo’s waste-pickers. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 39(1), 53–68.
• Rosaldo, M. (2022). The antinomies of successful mobilization: Colombian recyclers manoeuvre between dispossession and exploitation. Development and Change, 53(2), 251–278.
• Samson, M. (2020). Whose frontier is it anyway? Reclaimer “integration” and the battle over Johannesburg’s waste-based commodity frontier. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 31(4), 60–75.
• *Samson, M. (2021). Johannesburg is threatening to sideline informal waste pickers. Why it’s a bad idea. The Conversation. Retrieved May 19, 2022, from http://theconversation.com/johannesburg-is-threatening-to -sideline-informal-waste-pickers-why-its-a-bad-idea-159969.
• *Tucker, J. L., & Anantharaman, M. (2020). Informal work and sustainable cities: from formalization to reparation. One Earth, 3(3), 290–299.The Black Radical Tradition
• Cedric, J. R. (2021). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Penguin Books.
• Coates, T.-N. (2014). The Case for Reparations. The Atlantic, May 22. https:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/ 361631/.
• Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (3rd edn., 1998). The Free Press.
• *Kelley, Robin D. G. (2017). What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial capitalism? Boston Review, January 12. http://bostonreview.net/race/robin -d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism.
• Kelley, Robin D. G. (2021). Why Black Marxism, why now? Boston Review, January 25. https://bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-tk -2/.
• Melamed, J. (2015). Racial capitalism. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(1), 76–85.

ONLINE MULTIMEDIA BACKGROUND MATERIALS

For Supply-Chain Inquiry Exercise

Clothing

• Planet Money’s T-Shirt Project. (n.d.). NPR. https://choice.npr.org/index .html?origin=https://www.npr.org/series/248799434/planet-moneys-t -shirt-project?t=1659470529658.
• Unravel: The final resting place of your cast-off clothing. (2016). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOOI5LbQ9B8.
• Fashion: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). (2015). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdLf4fihP78.

Plastics and electronics

• The Story of Electronics. (2010, November 4). [Video]. YouTube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW_7i6T_H78.
• The piles of plastic waste swallowing villages in Indonesia. (2019, July 13). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhdziTQRqHg.
• PBS NewsHour. (2019, November 28). The Plastic Problem – A PBSNewsHour Documentary [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1RDc2opwg0I.

For Ethic of Action Exercise

Waste picker testimonials

• WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. (2019, March 22). SWaCH Pune Seva Sahakari Sanstha | WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities 2018–2019 Finalist [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= ybhX9e0K8KY.
• Living Off Trash: South Africa’s Waste Pickers Recycle up to 90% of Plastic and Packaging. (2019, June 3). Global Citizen. https://www.globalcitizen .org/en/content/south-africa-waste-pickers-plastic-recycling/.
• In the Field. (2018). “These are not considered to be ‘good’ jobs.” SoundCloud. https://soundcloud.com/inthefieldindia/episode-4-these-are -not-co.

ISSUE BACKGROUND

Worldwide, about two billion people work informally, which is more than one half of non-agricultural employment in most regions of the Global South (ILO, 2018). Informal work includes a range of income-generating activities outside of state labor protections and the wage relation. There is great variation in informal work, ranging from unregistered, small firms that supply cheap inputs into capitalist production processes, reducing costs for formal firms; to own account operators like waste pickers and street vendors; to informal employees like day laborers and domestic workers. While informal work is more readily associated with the Global South, it is prevalent in the Global North as well. Moreover, characteristics associated with informal work – low pay, job insecurity and temporary, contract-based employment without benefits or labor protections—are becoming generalized, as seen through the ascendance of the gig economy.

Informal workers, many of whom are women or from racialized groups, produce economic, social and environmental value for cities – value that is often underestimated or overlooked. The case of informal recyclers in Asian, African and Latin American cities offers a good example of the value produced by informal work, as well as the ways in which this value is overlooked by powerful actors. Worldwide, waste picking sustains some 15 million people, providing needed income. Grassroots recyclers toil in difficult conditions while facing stigma, harassment and even deadly violence. They sort through municipal dumps and roam urban streets extracting reusable, repairable and recyclable materials from discards. Their work builds functioning value chains for recyclables, generating income for themselves and materials for other markets, metabolizing post-consumer waste and providing the only opportunity for recycling in many cities (Dias, 2016; Gutberlet, 2020). They have irreplaceable knowledge crucial to maximizing the value in waste. While there is great variability, the informal sector can rival formal sector material recovery rates. Waste pickers reduce the cost of public waste management services by diverting recyclables away from landfills. They also reduce the climate impacts of waste and unmanaged plastic pollution.

Even though waste pickers produce environmental, economic and social value for cities, they are often criminalized. They are accused of stealing, begging or vagrancy. They are rarely acknowledged as engaging in productive activities. Instead, they are harassed by police or evicted from municipal dumps, which are handed over to private companies that extract wealth from waste. Dominant policy frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) deem informal work problematic and even environmentally unsustainable. Why?

First, informality challenges mainstream assumptions about what work and value look like. Informal work is excluded from dominant economic imaginaries, widely shared assumptions of economically productive activity. Feminist geographers Gibson-Graham coined this term, critiquing the restricted ideas of valuable work and corresponding notions of valuable people that currently dominate (Gibson-Graham, 2006). Using the term “imaginaries” reminds us that core economic assumptions are ideas made up by people. How we value things in the economy is not a product of natural forces of supply and demand, as neoclassical economics might have us believe, but reflects specific assumptions, judgements and values (see Moreno-Cruz, this book). Second, the frame of racial capitalism helps us recognize how these dominant economic imaginaries both devalue non-white bodies and enshrine their exploitation. This dominant economic imaginary associates work, and consequently worth, with a regular wage paid by an employer in a private establishment, rather than in public space, even as the work of so many looks very different. Thus, those who work in public spaces or in ways that do not fit this narrow definition of work—especially those marked as “racialized others”—are often targeted for removal. Furthermore, informal waste work is sometimes framed as an environmental harm rather than an environmental service. This act of misrecognition, both of the work and of the workers, then justifies dispossession.

The main response to informal work has been formalization, pushed for by the International Labour Organization and the SDGs. Formalization is shorthand for a range of policies seeking to align economic activities with the law, either changing legal codes or reforming behaviors. This can include decriminalizing informal work, licensing businesses, requiring tax compliance, enforcing labor and environmental regulations, or enforcing use-of-space rules. However, legalistic formalization projects, rooted in Eurocentric urban knowledge, fail to understand the diverse realities of most cities. While legalistic policy frameworks value rule-following for its own sake, critical researchers demonstrate the anti-poor biases of law, the criminalization of poverty, and tendencies to leave the legal transgressions of elites unpunished (Tucker and Devlin, 2019).

Contrary to expectations, formalization does not necessarily solve problems for informal workers, or make those economic activities more valuable. Sometimes, legalistic, deficit-based formalization projects can perversely reduce worker power and incomes. For instance, a Montevideo recyclers cooperative transferred a share of their collective daily earnings to members unable to work due to sickness or caretaking obligations (O’Hare, 2020). Under a labor formalization project, this “parallel social security system” and other important flexibilities in financing and intermediation were lost. In Delhi, the construction of a waste-to-energy plant, partially funded by the UN Clean Development Mechanism, dispossessed hundreds of waste pickers while also producing toxic ash and pollution in neighboring localities (Demaria and Schindler, 2016). Indeed, the discursive construction of the informal as a problematic space requiring reform is a precursor to imagining sites which can be enclosed and privatized.

Moreover, formalization projects sometimes ignore the conditions that compel people to work in jobs like waste picking. Here, we can learn from grassroots organizations like Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (trade union of waste pickers), which articulate the structural factors that drive women to waste picking work.

Waste picking had been a means of earning that they had been pushed into when they migrated to the city in large numbers during the drought in 1972. Then, even more so than now, their caste had prevented their easy entry into domestic work. Construction labor, because had been an option that they had rejected because “Who wants to work as a construction labourer? The supervisors treat you like their wives.” They [waste pickers] concluded that waste picking was relatively more lucrative than domestic work, more “free” from sexual harassment and the servile feudal relationships in wage labour that they had been subjected to in the villages. They had always been aware that secure jobs were hard to come by and also realised that we would not be able to fulfill this aspiration (Chikarmane and Narayan, 2005)

Formalization projects that ignore the broader structural conditions like sexism, casteism and racism that push people into informal work address symptoms, but do not treat the underlying disease.

Informal work is growing and makes major contributions to society. However, it is not without its problems. Informal livelihoods are complex and contradictory, combining individualism and community, care and exclusions, competition and collaboration, autonomy and drudgery. Waste picking can expose people to toxicity and disease. However, legalistic, deficit-based formalization projects are not the solution. Dominant academic and policymaking documents treat informal workers as “passive objects of study”(Samson, 2010) or operate through benevolence, a stance which reproduces racial and imperial hierarchies of power (Roy, 2006). This deficit-based analysis then proposes interventions such as formalization, which seek to discipline and fix informal workers, while leaving the conditions that produce poverty, precarity and ecological damage in place.

Thus, the goal of this learning activity is for students to re-examine how the informal is conceptualized and acted upon by mainstream development actors. We propose decentering formalization as a primary goal of initiatives like the SDGs. We are not opposed to formalization per se, but rather argue that too many formalization projects emerge from a partial and incomplete understanding of the core drivers of poverty, inequality and informality, and thus propose solutions that can inadvertently worsen the problems they seek to address.

Rather, for formalization to address social and environmental inequities, it must redistribute resources and power to informal workers, and thus needs to move beyond a deficit-based interventionist lens.

Drawing on the Black radical tradition, we invite our students, as well as other interlocutors, to explore how this reorientation can be realized through an ethic and practice of reparation, which seeks to reimagine and recreate social relations from a full acknowledgement of the injustices of the past as they live into the present. We advocate reparation over justice because dominant, liberal notions of justice center the individual, foreclose consideration of histories of harm and deny the need for collective redress.

In the journal article that this teaching case is based on, we articulate three modes of thinking to reconceptualize informal work and animate an alternative, ethical economic imaginary: thinking historically, thinking relationally and thinking spatially. Yet it is not enough to think differently. Urban economies come into being in and through webs of social relations, which tie people to particular modes of laboring, living, creating and consuming. Thus, we also argue for concrete actions oriented toward social and environmental justice: redistributing wealth and power, strengthening workers’ organizations and recovering politics from technocratic capture.

This approach underscores the interlinked nature of liberatory thought and action, or praxis. As such, the teaching case and learning experiences emphasize that such an agenda cannot be designed and executed from the top down, but must emerge through an authentic collaboration with workers and communities on the ground. Such collaborations are only possible by listening (see also Kroeker, this book) and expanding our notions of the agents of sustainable development, which, in turn, require radical humility on the part of “experts,” while valuing workers’ knowledge, power and political forms. Without such a reframing, historically marginalized groups may well be excluded, exploited or expelled from environmental initiatives.

PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS

Background for Educators

This project presents a pair of conceptually linked activities that aim to reorient development practice from an interventionist mindset to one that is oriented around an ethic and practice of reparation. The first activity prepares students to think relationally about resource–value–waste chains; while the second prepares them to reflect on their own ethic of action, inspired by writings of some key thinkers in the Black radical tradition.

Activity 1 is designed to achieve Learning Outcome 1. The pedagogical approach of this activity is to make the familiar unfamiliar. In groups, students will pick a consumer good that they use regularly (cell phones, clothing), and research what happens before they purchase the product, and after they throw it away into the recycling bin. The activity helps students examine the contours of risk, responsibility, burden and value distribution along the resource–value– waste chain. The background readings can assist students in making sense of the supply chain of their product. In particular, the introduction of Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s book, History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, offers important conceptual tools to evaluate the justice or fairness dimensions of systems of production and consumption.

Students should pick a product that they use and have a connection to, as Activity 1 leads into Activity 2, which focuses their attention on questions of ethics and mutual vulnerability. Students should also pick a “recyclable” product, as this will direct their attention to global informal waste economies. In our experience, this is the first time students have looked “beyond the bin,” so we emphasize the post-consumption phase in the readings and lectures. Indeed, students are sometimes shocked to learn that the materials they carefully deposit in recycling bins are never recycled locally, and often shipped off to distant countries. By examining the spatial distribution of global consumption of a product versus global waste work by informal waste workers, students will learn more about the social and environmental value that informal waste workers generate, and how this value subsidizes their own lives as consumers.

Activity 1, which can also be used as a stand-alone exercise, also encourages students to think about production processes, material extraction, labor and technology, and to see how these processes are linked. We see the potential of using this activity in classes where political economy is not a central theme, as it grounds these processes in students’ everyday lives. Many of these production, disposal or recycling processes are not transparent, and students can become frustrated when they have difficulty tracing complex value chains. Robin Dunkin’s chapter in this volume offers some useful insights on how to create space for students to sit in the space of not-knowing.

We anticipate that Activity 1 will take one to two 60-minute class sessions to set up, one week to complete the research, and one class session to present findings, spanning a total of two weeks. If there isn’t enough time to have students conduct a supply chain inquiry exercise, the learning outcomes can be achieved by engaging podcasts/documentaries on production–consumption systems and the afterlives of waste paired with an in-class discussion about the risks and burdens associated with production and disposal, and the pleasure and convenience associated with consumption (see background materials). Alternatively, the value–waste chain inquiry exercise can be expanded and made more rigorous by having students present their findings in a research paper.

To begin their engagement with Learning Outcome 2, students should read and discuss Tucker and Anantharaman (2020), which will introduce them to dominant economic imaginaries about informality, such as those embedded in the SDGs. The article offers three modes of thinking to reconceptualize informal work in relation to global economic processes of production and consumption: thinking historically, relationally, and spatially. This way of thinking about informal work as connected to consumption and production reveals how the value produced by informal workers subsidizes urban economies and ecologies, even as capitalism reproduces job scarcity, income inequality and poverty – the conditions which impel many to informal work. Educators should note that this is an expansive and challenging reading, and you might choose to supplement specific sections with additional reading, videos and podcasts provided in the background resources section. Alternatively, if there is more time, students could conduct a critical discourse analysis of policy documents to examine framing and rhetoric regarding informal work as an additional activity to be completed after Activity 1.

After completing the first activity and carefully reading Tucker and Anantharaman (2020), students will have learned about the social and environmental value that informal waste workers generate through their waste processing and recycling work, and the ways in which this value is frequently undervalued and misrecognized. The ultimate goal is to guide students to think critically about how informal work and workers are framed, problematized and acted upon by development organizations located in the Global North, which will then prepare them to engage with Learning Outcome 3.

Activity 2, developed over three parts (2.1, 2.2 and 2.3), presents an alternative ethic for sustainable development inspired by the Black radical tradition. Students will trace a lineage of radical thought and practice from W. E. B. Du Bois, through Dr. Martin Luther King and bell hooks to Cornell West, meeting Learning Outcome 3. Tucker and Anantharaman (2020) draw on this Black radical tradition to argue that an ethic and practice of reparation is needed to move toward just economies for informal workers. Reparation insists on a more equitable redistribution of resources, land, work, and the labors of care. In contrast to interventionist formalization, which targets workers or the economies that sustain them for reform, the field of action promoted by reparation is much broader, including the forces producing inequality and environmental harm. Reparation acts horizontally, centering communities most harmed by fomenting worker power, repairing historic injustices, and redistributing social power and resources to the grassroots.

After identifying the ethic of action articulated through the two readings and one speech listed below in Activity 2.1, students will distill some of their own principles for ethical engagement through a free writing exercise in Activity 2.2, meeting Learning Outcome 4. Activities 2.1 and 2.2 will prepare students to explore how reparation and other philosophies of action can be operationalized in sustainable development practice, as it pertains to informal waste workers. Students will assess how to translate ideas from Black radical tradition to a different context as they develop a statement of values for an imaginary nongovernmental organization (NGO) that collaborates with a waste pickers’ organization. In keeping with a focus on the grassroots, the scholarly reading for this activity from Indian civil rights luminary B. R. Ambedkar will be augmented by testimonies from grassroots waste pickers expressing their visions for the future. Activity 2.3 – building on the foundation of all prior activities – will support students to achieve Learning Outcome 5, demonstrating critical self-consciousness about their roles and responsibilities in efforts to “do good” given their positionality and social location in global hierarchies.

We anticipate Activity 2 will require a minimum of two 60-minute class periods, organized around completing Activities 2.1 and 2.2. in the first class period and Activity 2.3 the following week. Students will read materials in advance of both classroom activities and complete a writing assignment before Activity 2.1. Component parts of the activity can be scheduled according to specific classroom imperatives, allocating more or less time to each activity.

In Activity 2.1, students will read and reflect on reparation and abolition democracy – ideas from the Black radical tradition, a powerful lineage of scholars and activists asking how to create the conditions for freedom for all of us, but especially for Black Americans in the wake of slavery’s devastations. Activity 2.2 uses the free writing technique to encourage students to mine their own life experience for fertile insights about their values, practices and ethics. In the process outlined in Activity 2.3, students imagine they are working in collaboration with a waste pickers’ cooperative and develop a collective set of principles to guide their work. To do this, they will draw from waste picker stories and Dalit intellectual, civil rights and anti-caste activist B.R. Ambedkar. Working in small groups, students use a brainstorming strategy using sticky notes to gather, cluster, reflect on and refine student contributions. This discussion engages students in a collective project of identifying shared values. Facilitate this discussion carefully to encourage students to consider how their social location might influence a sense of entitlement to intervene in communities that are not their own. Encourage students to consider the conditions for solidarity rather than charity.

Table 3.1 Summary of the sequence, flow, and requirements of the Activity name

Activity 1. Resource–value–waste chain inquiry exercise

This assignment is designed to help you explore the life of a product that you use every day. The products we buy in local stores are often manufactured in faraway places by people who might live very different lives from our own. And when you finish using the product, it goes on to another life altogether. From resource extraction to production to disposal and recycling, a number of different actors are implicated in global value–waste chains. You will research a commodity (choose between clothing, plastic or electronic goods) to map the actors and locations involved in the production and afterlife of the commodity.

1.1 Picking your commodity

You will work in groups of three to identify a commodity to research. The following guidelines will help you pick a commodity:

1. Pick a commodity that you can buy locally, and ideally one that you use on a regular basis. The commodity should be manufactured or sourced from outside the country where you reside, and be recyclable.
2. You will have an easier time with the research if you pick a consumer good that is either associated with a well-known brand or one sold at a well-known retailer. For example, products from Nike, Gap, Walmart, Apple, Patagonia or The Body Shop would be good choices. It can be hard to find out the story of the exact product that you have chosen. Indeed, global supply chains are not always transparent and there is a reason for that, as you will soon see! If that is the case, you can look to see what generally happens to these types of products.
3. Before you settle on the consumer goods you will investigate, do a simple Internet search to see if you can find information that will help you answer the questions listed below in section 1.2. You don’t want to pick a product that hasn’t been studied by others, as that supply chain will be much harder to trace.

1.2 Researching your commodity

Once you have picked your commodity, use the following questions as guides for your research:

1. How do you use this product every day? What does it do for you? How would not having this item impact your capacity to participate in school, work and community life?
2. What raw materials and labor are needed to produce this consumer good? Where are these raw materials sourced from? In what places is this labor located?
3. What do you do when you are done using the product? Where do you get rid of it?
4. What happens to the product after you dispose of it? Where does it go? What is done with it? And by whom and in what conditions?
5. Are there ecological or fairness issues you can identify through your analysis of this product’s life and afterlife?
6. How has your relationship with this product changed as a consequence of learning more about its journey before and after you spend time with it?

As you do your research, you will collectively prepare short notecards that answer each of these questions. The notecards should have appropriate citation information and should be submitted along with the other components of the assignment. Remember that it might be hard to find precise information. In cases where you aren’t sure what exactly happens or who is involved, it’s okay to indicate that. Your instructor can help you fill in the gaps.

1.3 Presenting your research

Your output for this assignment will be in the form of a 15-minute presentation. You are welcome to use the format of your choice (Prezi, PowerPoint, Infographic, etc.), as long as your presentation meets the criteria outlined below. Writing good presentations is a challenge! You will be evaluated on both the content and quality of your presentation.

Content guidelines:

1. Your presentation should be broadly accessible, which means you should avoid jargon and use simple and direct language. Imagine that you are presenting to a group of first-year college students from various majors.

60 Teaching environmental justice

How will you make this presentation accessible and interesting to such an audience?

2. Your presentation should include text and images. It can also include audio if you wish.
3. Your presentation should have a clear focus and storyline, and answer the questions laid out above. It should have an introduction section, a main body that presents your research, and a short conclusion.
4. It is important that you personalize your story, and tell us about what this product means to you, as well as how this research project has changed your thinking about this project.
5. Your presentation must cite at least five sources. Your sources can include annual reports by companies, official documents produced by regulatory agencies, scholarly articles and books, third-party reports and audits, media articles, videos and documentaries.
   a. You should cite at least one scholarly source.b. Use the American Psychological Association (APA) citation style for your sources.

Activity 2. Our ethic of action

In this activity, you will first analyze the ethic of action of some key thinkers in the Black radical tradition. Then, with this analysis as a support, you will reflect on your own ethic of action. Finally, we come together as a class to develop a collective set of principles for ethical engagement in situations of inequality and across power differentials. We will ask how to translate the principles of the Black racial tradition to other contexts, listening especially to the expertise of waste pickers and grassroots recyclers.

2.1 The Black radical ethic of action

Background articles:

• Greene II, R. (2018). The Legacy of Black Reconstruction. Jacobin. https:// jacobin.com/2018/08/web-du-bois-black-reconstruction-civil-rights.

• Waste Pickers. (n.d.). WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing). https://www.wiego.org/waste-pickers.

Resources from the Black radical tradition:

• King Jr., M. L. (1968). “Honoring Dr. Du Bois.” Carnegie Hall. https:// credo.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums312-b287-i008/#page/2/ mode/1up.
• hooks, b. (2006). Love as the Practice of Freedom. Grassroots Economic Organizing. https://geo.coop/content/bell-hooks-love-practice-freedom.

• Cornel, W. (2019). 2019 MLK Keynote Address. Presented at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Series, Center for Social Equity & Inclusion Rhode Island School of Design. https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/studentaffairs_MLK/ Keynotes/Presentations/13/.

You will read and reflect on reparations and abolition democracy – ideas out of the Black radical tradition, a powerful lineage of scholars and activists asking how to create the conditions for freedom for all of us, but especially for Black Americans in the wake of slavery’s devastations. Scholars like Cornel West, Angela Davis, bell hooks and TaNehisi Coates carry on the legacy of abolitionists like W. E. B. Du Bois and civil rights giant the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Their research, writing and activism can help us to develop an ethic of action to guide our own practice of justice.

After reading the background article about W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of abolition democracy, carefully read the two articles and listen to the speech listed above. Take notes, identifying keywords or phrases that capture something important in relation to the author’s ideas about how we can move toward justice – what we are calling their ethic of action. Write a short reflection that explains the ethic of action communicated by these visionaries. Be sure to directly quote the authors as well as offer your own analysis. Include an analysis of how the Black radical ethic of action differs from the interventionist practice. Your reflections should be at least 600 words.

Notice the arc of history traced in these texts. In 1968, shortly before his assassination, Dr. King reflected on the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois, who was born in 1868, just a few years after white racism undermined Reconstruction, which was a bold experiment in multiracial democracy. Sixty years later, Cornel West calls us to carry forth the legacy of both Dr. King and W. E. B. Du Bois. Both bell hooks and Cornel West honor the legacy of the civil rights movement while also offering a constructive critique oriented toward learning from its shortcomings, especially how movements internalize oppressive dynamics from mainstream culture. As you read and listen, you might consider how these scholars think about the role of history, truth-telling, battles over ideas, social struggle, organizing, scholarship, critical self-knowledge, critical consciousness, our blind spots, Black/racial pride, interracial alliances/solidarity/accomplice-ship, dialogue across difference, overlapping and interlocking systems of oppression, spiritual poverty, racial vs. reform solutions, individual vs. collective action, vocations vs. professions, deep community, deep education, love, love warriors, a love ethic, service to others, listening to the voices of the oppressed, goodness, beauty, abolition, the catastrophes of our time and faith in ordinary people.

2.2 My ethic of action

Write longhand for four–five minutes on the prompts listed below, without pausing. After you respond to the prompts, read over what you have written, underlining anything interesting, surprising or important.

Free writing prompts:

1. Think of a time when you, with others, felt that you had a positive impact. Describe this experience with as many details as you can: who was there; what did you do; what did you feel; what did you think; who said what, etc.?
2. What values, ethics or principles oriented your actions and the actions of others?
3. How do these principles compare to or draw from those of the Black radical tradition?

Now, reread what you have written, underlining compelling or interesting phrases and identifying two to five principles that guide your ethic of action (your ideas about how we can move toward justice). Remember, you wrote about the ethic of action proposed by leaders in the Black radical tradition in the last lesson.

Note to instructor: If class time allows, students can be invited to share their principles. It might also be helpful to incorporate some of the contemplative techniques introduced in the chapters by Tracey Osborne and Sapana Doshi, and Elizabeth Allison to invite deeper reflection on self in relation to the world.

2.3 Our statement of values

This activity will support us to work collectively to identify our shared ethic of action. We will also think comparatively and translate the praxis of the Black radical tradition to a different context.

Preparation: read the waste picker testimonials and the short excerpt from Dalit intellectual, civil rights and anti-caste activist B.R. Ambedkar, again identifying several key words or phrases that capture something important about the ethic of action being expressed.

• Ambedkar, B. R. (2014). Annihilation of Caste. Verso Books.
• De Brito, D. (2012). God is My Alarm Clock: A Brazilian Waste Picker’sStory. WIEGO Workers.
• Life & Voices (2015). Global Alliance of Waste Pickers. https://globalrec.org/life-and-voices/.
• KKPKP (2013, June 2). Waste Workers in Pimpri Chinchwad [Video].YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLS9kEIE_Ik. Statement of values exercise:

This portion of the activity will progress in five phases, with each phase taking 15–30 minutes, such that the first four activities can be completed in one 60-minute class period or all five across two class periods.

Phase 1: Small groups. Imagine we are working with “Recycling Justice,” an international NGO supporting waste picker organizing that is committed to solidarity with informal workers. Our task is to define the NGO’s statement of values in preparation for this collaboration. In small groups, discuss the following questions.

1. What are some key principles and values advocated for by waste picker leaders and B. R. Ambedkar?
2. How are these principles similar to or different from those advocated by thinkers in the Black radical tradition?
3. As a group, and drawing from the Black radical tradition, waste pickers and the movement for Dalit rights, what do you think should be three to five priority principles for Recycling Justice? On sticky notes, write a short phrase that captures the heart of each principle.

Below are guidelines for the educator to carry out the in-class discussion:

Phase 2: Gathering principles. Ask each group in turn to explain one of their principles, posing questions or supplementing student contributions where appropriate. Then, ask students to post their sticky note on a wall or chalkboard, where there is enough space for many sticky notes. Ask the presenters and the class to cluster similar principles together, identifying opportunities to clarify meanings or finesse the wording of principles. This process should continue until all the sticky notes are posted.

Phase 3: Class discussion. Open up space for discussion. Discuss together the spatial arrangement of the sticky notes, asking if the notes are in the right cluster of likeminded statements. Ask if anyone has clarifications, refinements or objections to specific principles. If there is time, ask if anyone feels like another principle or two must be added.

Phase 4: Voting on principles. Based on the group size and time constraints, decide how many collective principles the class will articulate. Give students three (or more) votes to choose which they think are the most important principles. Students can vote with sticker dots or marking an X next to their top choices. Student groups will work with the top voted principles (or cluster of principles) in the next step.

Phase 5: Refining our principles. Form new groups tasked with refining the intent and wording of each principle. These groups can refine one or more principles, depending on the class size, time and number of principles identified. Have students write their refined principles in a shared Google Doc, available for everyone to see on a projector.

ADDRESSING COMMON CHALLENGES AND REFLECTIONS ON EQUITY IN THE CLASSROOM

Activity 1 is a multi-stage, group assignment where there could be challenges maintaining continuity and student engagement. Educators might want to set aside in-class time for group preparation and recruit research support from librarians. In any group project, there is always the danger that some students take over and marginalize other group members; whereas others might not pull their weight. A group-work reflection, to be submitted by each member at the end of the project, can help keep students accountable to each other and the educator. Such a form would ask students to identify what went well in their project, where they struggled, what their individual contribution was; share kudos or appreciation for one or more team members; and describe what they learned about collaboration and leadership through this group work. The educator can also solicit suggestions on how the assignment could be changed in the future.

A common equity challenge in the classroom is to recognize diverse experiences of students in the classroom vis-à-vis production–consumption systems. Activity 1 doesn’t give students many opportunities to bring themselves, their histories and identities into the activity. Instead, it tends to lump all consumers into one bucket, which is problematic as consumption patterns across class and race are highly unequal in the United States, for instance. Further, it hides other ways in which students and their families might locate themselves within production–consumption systems (as workers, farmers, etc.). Acknowledging these differences is important in creating an inclusive classroom.

In Activity 2, power dynamics among students based on their social location in overlapping systems of oppression will likely surface while discussing ethics of action. Undoubtedly there will be disagreements. Please see Daniel and Ramirez-Ruiz (this book) for guidance about creating belonging and relational, non-hierarchical learning environments that cultivate a sense of shared purpose. Educators might want to seek additional resources on challenging microaggressions and moving toward consensus without papering over substantive disagreements. Another approach would be to put the onus on students to reflect on the group process itself, identifying factors that contributed to a productive collaboration and consensus finding, what factors challenged collaboration and what could be improved on in the process.

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