Biography

Aparna Agarwal is an Assistant Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global University. She completed her D.Phil. from the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Before joining the University of Oxford, she finished her B.A. (hons.) from University of Delhi, and M.A and M.Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, in Political Science.

Aparna’s D.Phil. thesis titled (Re)moving Waste: Caste, Spaces, and Materials in Delhi examines geographies of waste in relation with the on-going waste crisis and changing social relations among sanitation and waste workers in Delhi. In her research, she argues that the waste crisis is fundamentally a crisis of governance. The present-day solutions to this crisis focus mainly on the removal of waste, i.e., treating it as a matter to be cleaned, emphasizing waste management and environmental abuse. Her thesis posits that the waste crisis is intricately linked with the processes of urbanisation, caste-based discrimination, uneven development and human and non- human infrastructure. As the crisis is mushrooming across the city, it occupies ‘discarded spaces’ and marginalised lives (lower caste lives in Indian context). Based on one-and-half year long ethnographic field work and archival research, she examines the crisis through the lens of politico-technical waste infrastructures and social relations and place it within the larger thematic of urban sociology, ecology and value struggles. Through a focus on waste workers—sanitation workers, waste pickers, garbage collectors and recyclers across different spaces in Delhi, her thesis explores flows and forms of waste and changing social caste-based social relations and hierarchies, claims for social justice and how they are shaped by the changing materiality of waste and socio-economic-ecological transformations.