Skills in ‘unskilled’ work: a case of waste work in Central India

Drawing on Lave’s theorisation of situated learning, this article engages with skills in the so-called ‘unskilled’ domain of waste work. Waste work involves handling diverse material discards, from household vegetable peelings, metal and plastic scraps, to human and animal faecal material and corpses. In India, forms of waste work are toxic, historically stigmatised, burdened on Dalit and Adivasi bodies, and officially categorised as ‘unskilled’ work. Based on fieldwork in a town in central India, the paper draws attention to skills in waste work, documenting social practices that involve processes of learning and acquiring skills. Analysing institutions that mediate skill acquisition in waste work, the paper argues that ‘skilled’ work is politically and socially constructed and materially contingent. The article destabilises reified notions of how work gets classified as ‘(un)skilled’. Further, the paper reflects on the conflicts and paradoxes that a conversation on skills in waste work throws up: valuing and recognising different forms of waste work while also pointing to their toxicities and struggles.