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11 - Ecological Routes to Social Status and Urban Inclusion

Theorizing Citizenship through Waste Work

from Part IV - Bending the Curve

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2021

Paul Roscoe
Affiliation:
University of Maine
Cindy Isenhour
Affiliation:
University of Maine
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Summary

This chapter explores the links between consumption and social status through an ethnographic study of how waste pickers, individuals and communities who reclaim and recycle the discards of elite and middle-class consumption, make claims to social status in the neoliberal city.It demonstrates how organizations representing waste pickers, who perform stigmatized work and are marginalized in urban environmental movements, effectively use ecological citizenship discourses to make successful claims to status, security, and urban inclusion. However, in the process, elite power over environmental imaginaries is reasserted in a manner that further exacerbates inequities in environmental status.

Type
Chapter
Information
Consumption, Status, and Sustainability
Ecological and Anthropological Perspectives
, pp. 272 - 295
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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