Dana Kornberg

Dana Kornberg, PhD

About Me

(she/they)

I’m an urban ethnographer and qualitative sociologist working on issues of environmental and economic justice in India and the United States. Currently, I’m an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC-Santa Barbara and a 2023-24 ACLS Fellow. My research addresses environmental and economic institutions - waste collection and recycling systems, water utilities, and local businesses - to reveal processes through which global capital, colonial and state power, and racial/caste oppression are consolidated and resisted across urban contexts. I maintain a deep commitment to practicing sociology as a means of social transformation, and my goal as an instructor is to empower students with analyses that allow them to act in the face of multiple forms of injustice. My current book project The Garbage Economy: Caste Capitalism and the Persistence of Informal Recycling in Delhi is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Research

Under regimes of (post)colonial racial capitalism, what are the logics and institutions that distribute ecological resources and harms to create extreme patterns of urban segregation globally? How do social groups come to be valued and afforded resources through historically specific classifications - especially based on colonization, race, and caste? And where are the spaces for alternative visions and positions to be asserted within or against them?

My ethnographic and qualitative research focuses on urban areas in the United States and India and has included infrastructures for waste collection & recycling and water utilities. I work to identify not only ostensibly complete forms of domination or explicit forms of resistance, but also the quieter logics and practices that challenge them. I work independently and collaboratively and have experience collaborating with students and community groups.

Driving my interests is a deeply held conviction that contemporary capitalism leaves too little space for creating healthy, liberated individuals and communities. Instead, insatiable greed and the imperative of accumulation promotes forms of valuation that not only extract “resources,” but untether relations, pollute the planet, and stifle creative expression and forms of knowledge. How might better understanding the antagonistic dynamics that perpetuate this oppression allow us to nourish the healthier, more liberated practices that exist already?

Teaching & Mentoring

I love to teach. The space of the university was foundational to my own intellectual and political awakening, and I aim to similarly empower students to understand their own social positions and support them as they pursue their own callings.

I view the college classroom as a place to develop the skills to make sense of the world’s randomness and grapple with some of its most vexing moral questions. My ambition is to empower students with the critical capacities, skills, and confidence they need to navigate an increasingly uncertain future. I have three goals as an instructor: to create an inclusive classroom that promotes cross-cultural competence, to develop critical thinking capacities, and to advance individual learning and career trajectories.

It is my dual role as an ethnographer and educator of first-generation college students that leads me to value practical experience as a crucial teacher. I bring the world beyond the university into the classroom through moderated discussions, illustrative media, and guest speakers, while also reflecting on the university itself as a shared institutional space.

I have served as a committee member and mentor for undergraduate and doctoral students with a variety of interests. I have a range of teaching interests and experience, including topics in race & ethnicity; urban sociology; economic sociology; environmental sociology; and ethnographic and qualitative methods.

Course Offerings