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Paper short abstract:

Drawing from fieldwork conducted with the communities that live and work around the largest and oldest dumping yard in India, the paper examines how climate change and unprecedented heat waves are endangering their lives and livelihoods.

Paper long abstract:

The Deonar dumping yard in Mumbai is home to a large community of working-class Dalit and Muslim migrant workers, who move to the dumping yard from within the city and elsewhere in the country to find livelihood in the steadily expanding economy of waste management. The dumping yard has always been a fire hazard, with fires in the past raging for days on end. However, with climate change and the unprecedented heat waves the country has experienced over the past few years, life around the dumping yard has become more precarious than before. With mounds of untreated garbage putrefying in the heat, residents fear for their lives as much as their livelihoods. The houses surrounding the dumping yard are themselves designed for packing people in, much less for ventilation. With tinned roofs or tarpaulin shades overhead, residents describe the insides of their homes as 'smelling like death'. The paper focuses specifically on women in the community and how they manage their intimate, social, and economic lives under these circumstances. As I watch women move their intimate lives out onto shaded corridors and damp alleyways to shield themselves from the pent up heat inside the home, while devising ways to escape the toxic air that blows in their direction from the dumping yard, I observe how their daily lives and routines become reconfigured around the management of heat. These negotiations with temporalities of heat, in turn, reshape the ways in which they relate to ideas of the public and the private.