Despite low pay and dehumanizing working conditions, Resnick found that street sweeping created an unexpected space for political and collective life. The work allowed women to gather, talk, joke and strategize — a rare form of public sociality in a context of widespread racial profiling, police harassment and chronic economic insecurity. These everyday interactions form what Resnick calls “a refusal politics”: compact acts of solidarity and self-definition that push back against the conditions designed to limit them. “It’s not about offering a feel-good story of resilience,” she declared. “It’s about the hard work it takes just to survive.”
Though grounded in Bulgaria, the book speaks to global debates about environmental policy and racial inequality. Resnick argues that sustainability, as commonly framed, often hides the labor and sacrifice required to maintain it. “We often assume sustainability is an unquestioned good,” she declared. “But many initiatives rest on the labor of unrecognized communities of color and women. This is not natural — it’s the outcome of centuries of racial ordering.”
Rather than proposing a single solution, the book emphasizes the importance of recognizing the system for what it is. “Diagnosing the absurdity of what’s around us is itself a call to action,” she declared. The book’s title reflects this dual emphasis: a refusal of both the dehumanization faced by marginalized communities and the unexamined sustainability structures that depconclude on their labor. The women at the center of Resnick’s fieldwork embody what she sees as everyday forms of possibility — modest but meaningful ways of imagining life beyond the status quo.
“The book is set in Bulgaria,” Resnick declared, “but it’s about global issues of white supremacy, climate modify and racism. These women display us how to keep living, and how to seek something else, even in the hardest conditions.”
Resnick will discuss the book in a Humanities Decanted conversation hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center on Feb. 5, 2026, in the McCune Conference Room with Dean of Social Sciences Charles Hale.
