CREES Noon Lecture. Running Water in the Land of Spitting Dragons: Romani Labor and the Animation of Urban Infrastructures in Bulgaria

In this CREES Noon Lecture, Elana Resnick will explore the ways in which Romani (“Gypsy”) laborers and residents of segregated Romani neighborhoods in Sofia, Bulgaria handle inconsistent infrastructural access, focusing on water that flows only intermittently from outdoor taps. Resnick will illustrate how seemingly haphazard public utility provision prompts certain lines of logic-making that in turn reconfigure and animate the local landscape. The animation of local infrastructures becomes a secondary—and unpaid—form of Romani labor that enables laborers to live in conditions of infrastructural instability. Instead of understanding their urban environment as one of lack and loss, many Roma living amidst material insecurity restructure their landscape into something full of life. Inanimate objects—like drain faucets and dead leaves—become dragons spitting water and fresh spinach. Join us for a discussion on the consequences of the animation of non-living objects on neighborhood sociality, connections to state apparatuses, and human-material relationships.

Elana Resnick holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University, Ohio where she is working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, “Nothing Ever Perishes: Waste, Race, and Transformation in an Expanding European Union.” She is also conducting research on European urban water infrastructures, energy politics and nuclear power, and the historical connections between socialist industrialization and postsocialist labor practices. Most recently she has held positions as a Weatherhead Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and a Global Europe Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C.