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? Where are the spaces for alternative visions and positions to be asserted within or against them?

My ethnographic and qualitative research focuses on urban regions in the United States and India and has included infrastructures for waste collection & recycling and water utilities. I seek to reveal how social groups come to be differently valued and afforded resources through historically specific classifications - especially based on colonization, race, and caste. These allow me to identify not only ostensibly complete forms of domination or explicit forms of resistance, but also quieter logics and practices of resistance that persist within, alongside, and against them. I work independently and collaboratively and have experience working with community advocates.

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 take an integrative approach teaching and mentoring that meets students where they are, treats them as whole people, and works to bridge forms of knowledge across and beyond academic disciplines. My goal is to equip students with the skills and confidence to navigate an increasingly uncertain future.

As an instructor, I have three primary goals: to create an inclusive classroom that promotes cross-cultural competence, to develop critical thinking capacities, and to advance individual learning trajectories. Students find my classroom to be a welcoming place to express ideas and ask questions, and I model and facilitate respectful, generous dialogue.

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 to support them as they pursue their own callings.

Course Offerings

Courses Taught

Lower-level Undergraduate