Alchemy at Its Limits: Waste, Race, and Transformation

Elana Resnick
Anthropology
UC Santa Barbara

What are the politics, mechanisms, and ramifications of socio-material alchemy, of radical transformation? Through a multi-scalar exploration of waste management in an expanding European Union, this book investigates the processes, practices, possibilities, and limits of socio-material transformation. Transformation is commonly linked with recycling, future-oriented potentiality, sociopolitical change. The term, transformation, has become popularized in social science literature and yet remains vague and undertheorized. This book provides a new way to think about what transformation means and where the limits of transformation lie. It does so by intervening into scholarly debates about the porous boundaries between humans and nonhuman things in order to ask how human-nonhuman transformation takes shape as humans are thingified, things become potential, and humans work to transform the world around them. Through a multi-scalar ethnographic exploration of waste management in Bulgaria, this book investigates the entangled ideologies and processes of transformation and racialization. The book forges a new mode of thinking about what happens in conditions of waste, white supremacy, and racist regimes that pushes past “resiliency” as a model for thriving; this book ultimately asks what it means to live beyond sustainability in order to transform, to alchemize, life into something much more vibrant.