When environmental risks are portrayed as uniformly affecting the entire population–regardless of classed, gendered, racial, legal, and other social dimensions–it unsettles the real socio-economic dynamics of environmental costs. Economic disparities are exacerbated by not only uneven environmental risk but also the incongruent labor expectations of creating resilience. Often, resilience relies on informal environmental labor, which is invisible in many formal valuation systems. Whether inadvertent misaccounting or deliberate extractivism, it intensifies structural gaps for already marginalized key groups like the working poor and informal laborers whose work makes burgeoning economies a reality.
My research focuses on the devaluation of informal environmental labor to reveal the unsettling politics, practices, and philosophies of informal environmental labor. It asks how depictions of legitimate environmental labor in these systems can deliberately be unsettled to obscure, address, and challenge standard narratives of what constitutes production and labor for a sustainable future. It argues that without accounting for the invisible environmental labor inherent in sustainability solutions, economic justice is not a viable reality.
This paper combines research across multiple scales and contexts of the process of invisiblization. By taking water in Delhi, India as a case study spanning generations and continents, it traces how women’s labor and knowledge is devalued at the literal pipeline—in water hauling and management techniques, in community planning, in infrastructural development—but also conceptually in the labor pipelines of women as water vanguards, from acknowledging agency from policy to engineering, from advocacy to academia. By uniting these strands, a much deeper pool of data underscores the perilous gaps—and major opportunities—to proactively recognize and reclaim this labor. Through its inclusion, the resulting shift in water sustainability has high potential to address the unfulfilled goals of the United Nations Water Decade.
