Shreyas Sreenath’s research investigates the relationship between caste power, disposable desires, and urban waste in postcolonial Bangalore, a city whose IT firms serve as signposts for a ‘modern’, ‘caste-less’, India. It does so through an ethnography of solid waste collection, small scale recycling, and sewage maintenance, performed overwhelmingly by Dalit communities under the supervision of landed castes. Focusing on unforeseen ‘black spots’ in municipal waste management, Shreyas explores how the volatility of waste both reinforces historic caste relations and opens new avenues to politicize them. While the disposability of contemporary waste facilitates a certain caste-blindness among the city’s inhabitants, he argues that its non-degradability sparks a renewed reckoning with caste history and its various futures. 

His writings meld influences from anthropology, history, and the environmental humanities. As an anthropologist, he sees in ethnography the radical potential to understand everyday life and reconstruct what is possible in it.