Elana Resnick

Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also leads the Infrastructural Inequalities Research Group. She studies waste, race, gender, and nuclear energy using multi-modal research methods. Elana has been conducting research in Bulgaria since 2003. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, and Public Culture. She is the recipient of the 2022 American Anthropological Association Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship and the 2023 Women’s Forum Article Prize of the British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies. Her first book, Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe, is forthcoming (July 2025) from Stanford University Press. Her current work, including a documentary film, is about the environmental and social politics of nuclear power development and decommissioning across Europe.