Dr Manisha Anantharaman gives the School’s 2025 Annual Welcome Lecture

Dr Manisha Anantharaman (Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, Paris) delivers the welcome week lecture to our new cohort of Foundation Year, Level One and Taught Postgraduate students.

We welcomed the newest members to our School last week as Foundation Year, Level One and Taught Postgraduate students became part of our community. A major highlight of those celebrations was our annual SSP Welcome Lecture, given this year by Dr Manisha Anantharaman (Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, Paris).

Manisha delivered a compelling presentation to a packed lecture theatre filled with students and staff, titled ‘Performative Environmentalism and the Everyday Legitimation of Climate Coloniality: Why is sociology vital for understanding the climate crisis?’.

We caught up with Manisha on her time in Leeds and what advice she would give to the newest members of our School community!

Dr Anantharaman speaking during the 2025 Annual Welcome Lecture.

Thank you so much for giving our annual Welcome Lecture in the School! How did you find your time in Leeds?

I had a wonderful time in Leeds. In addition to the Welcome Lecture, I was able to do a Master Class with PhD students as part of the Priestley Centre’s new Just Transitions theme. Across all my conversations, with the PhD students, with the incoming students in Sociology after my lecture and with the Faculty, I was impressed with the commitment to interdisciplinarity, a desire to connect research with impact, and the critical spirit. The sun also made an appearance a few times – for which I think one must be thankful in the North of England?

Dr Anantharaman presenting to the audience at the 2025 Annual Welcome Lecture.

What inspired you to pursue work in this field, at the intersection of sociology and climate change, and how has your intellectual journey evolved over time?

I started my career in the natural and physical sciences: studying how ecosystems were responding to a changing climate. In the course of my studies, I had the great fortune to read some sociology and political science scholarship about climate and environment. These texts helped me understand that at their core, environmental problems are social problems. I was hooked, because I loved both the opportunity to analyse social relations, structures and processes, but also the kind of liberatory optimism that this brought to my work as an environmental scholar. Because sociology denatualizes the word and reveals what is behind what appears inevitable or common-sensical.

Ultimately, I turned to sociology when I realized that the natural and biological sciences, while extremely useful to diagnose and characterize environmental problems of climate change, didn’t have much to offer in terms of what brings these problems about in the first place, and what to do about them.

Dr Hannah Morgan, Professor Mark Davis, Dr Manisha Anantharaman and Professor Karen Throsby after the lecture.

Can you share a project or achievement you're particularly proud of, and what made it meaningful to you?

This would be my 2024 book Recycling Class. It took me almost a decade to research and write. In this book, I grapple with the complexities of pursuing sustainability in a deeply unequal and exploitative world through a decade-long study of garbage politics in Bengaluru, India. Over the past decade, members of the city’s middle class have developed neighbourhood groups to support recycling, composting, and zero-waste lifestyles as solutions to the growing crisis of unmanaged waste. The book details how waste pickers – those who make a living by reclaiming value from discards – organized to obtain inclusion into these decentralized systems. Although these “DIY infrastructures” have created economic and political opportunities for waste pickers, these configurations also continue to reproduce class, caste, and gender-based divisions of labour. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that under the logics of neoliberal, racial capitalism, inclusion without social reform can reproduce unjust distributions of risk and responsibility.

I wrote it to synthesize my thinking on the tensions between social justice concerns and sustainability transitions. Writing this book was a labour of love, sustained by exchanges with colleagues and field interlocutors over many years.

Dr Manisha Anantharaman talking with students after the lecture.

What key message or idea do you hope the audience gained from your lecture in Leeds?

I would want them to see the importance of doing sociology that is carefully historicized, takes an intersectional approach to studying inequality, and makes room for situated knowledges: that emerge from multiple perspectives but can fruitfully be built into conversation and dialogue to generate comparative insight.

And to realize that as researchers and students we have a real opportunity to ask difficult questions. This is a real privilege and responsibility.

An image of the audience at the 2025 Annual Welcome Lecture.

What advice would you give to our undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in following a similar path?

Be patient with yourself and others. Be courageous! Don’t be afraid to ask for help. And talk to your fellow students and researchers! Research and learning is a collective endeavour that masks itself as individual achievement. But I have always embedded myself in intellectual spaces that have challenged me and this has helped me do interesting, fulfilling work.

An image of the audience clapping at the 2025 Annual Welcome Lecture

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