Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the role of Romanian Roma women in informal waste picking in Barcelona, framing recycling as a family project. It highlights the ambivalence of their labour: it reproduces community resilience while remaining largely hidden within public narratives.

Presentation long abstract

This paper analyses how intersectionality, i.e. the simultaneous operation of multiple and overlapping fields of domination, unfolds within contexts of environmental injustice, by exploring the contribution of Romanian Roma women to informal waste picking in Barcelona. In the city, sub-Saharan individuals and Romanian Roma family groups constitute the main informal recycling workforce. Within the Romanian Roma community, waste picking is organised through kinship networks and collective resource management. Labour is divided by gender, age, and space, with men collecting and transporting materials, and women and children sorting, repairing, and preparing them for resale within domestic spaces.

Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, the study examines the everyday practices of Roma women engaged in waste-based activities, framing waste picking as a family project that depends substantially on their contributions. It argues that while women’s labour in waste picking remains largely invisible in public narratives and institutional frameworks, in this case partly due to its domestic dimension and the resulting lack of visibility, it plays a central role in both sustaining the success of recycling activities and so in reproducing community resilience. This ambivalence, namely women’s labour as both reproductive and hidden, situates the study within Stefania Barca’s concept of forces of reproduction. In this perspective, Roma women’s work embodies both the structural inequalities embedded in waste picking and the agency that takes shape within the very constraints of this work. In these terms, this study explores the intersections of gender, class, and race within the context of the urban margins.