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

Courses Taught

Lower-level Undergraduate

  • Introduction to Sociology
  • Learning and Academic Success (summer bridge course)

Upper-level Undergraduate

  • Urban Sociology
  • The Sociology of Garbage
  • The Global City

Graduate Seminars

  • Global Urban Ethnography
  • The Sociology of Economic Life

Teaching Interests

Undergraduate

  • Urban Sustainability & Climate Change
  • En​vironmental Justice
  • Caste in Comparative Perspective

Graduate

  • Environmental Justice
  • Logics of Methods
  • Qualitative Methods
  • Graduate Professionalization & Writing
  • Global Approaches to Racial Capitalism

read my work

Current Sociology special issue “Brokering ​Novel Concepts into Economic Sociology.”

Oxford Bibliographies (Urban Studies), 2024


  • Co-authored with Mo Torres

University of Michigan Poverty Solutions Policy ​Brief, 2023


Social Forces, 2020


Economic & Political Weekly, Review of Urban ​Affairs, 2019

Local Environment, 2019

Critical Sociology, 2018


  • Co-authored with Amy Krings & Erin Lane
  • See our related policy brief here

International Journal of Urban & Regional ​Research (IJURR), 2016


  • Winner of the IJURR Annual Best Article ​Prize

contact me

Dana Kornberg

kornberg@ucsb.edu



View my CV here



Schedule an interview for my project on ​Black-owned businesses here