Malini Ranganathan
I am an urban geographer and Associate Professor at American University's School of International Service in Washington, DC. I'm interested in political ecologies of caste, race, labor, land, and environmental and climate justice. My coauthored book "Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, Publics of the Late Capitalist City" (Cornell University Press, 2023) studies how people deploy corruption discourse to narrate the ethics of rapid urban change in the contemporary city outside of conventional notions of legality and illegality. Stories about land grabs and slum dispossession narrate not corruption đť‘–đť‘› the system but corruption đť‘Žđť‘ the system. At the same time, corruption talk is used opportunistically by elites to criminalize marginalized groups, suggesting we pay careful attention to the race, class, caste, and gender of those narrating corruption. I am now working on two books: "The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor, and Social Justice Politics in Bengaluru" and "The Environment as Freedom: Confronting Global Political Ecologies of Caste and Race." I am co-editor of "Rethinking Difference in India Through Racialization: Caste, Tribe, and Hindu Nationalism in Transnational Perspective" (Routledge, 2022).
less
InterestsView All (31)
Uploads
Papers
that are used to justify the emergence of private property as a self-evident institution, but that also reveal the violence and impunity through which property-making proceeds. We argue that this renewed attention to the genealogies of property-making takes seriously
property’s legitimation through and reliance on social difference (e.g. Blatman-Thomas
and Porter, 2019; Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Bonds, 2019; Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Dorries, Hugill and Tomiak, 2019; Ranganathan, 2016; Roy, 2017; Safransky, 2017). Drawing on theories of racial capitalism, liberalism, and colonialism, critical property research interrogates how property and race come into being in mutually constitutive ways. This special issue aims to add empirical texture and analytical specificity to the conversation on racial regimes of property across the global North and South. We start from the premise that race-making’s property histories, and conversely, property-making’s racial histories, remain underexplored in critical geography literature.
of rail infrastructure and the Canadian metropolis. She
connects the dots between the building of the Canadian Pacific
Railroad (CPR) and its nodal North American cities on the one hand,
and transatlantic finance and its bankrolling by racial slavery and
colonialism on the one hand. It is a significant enterprise to write on
one topic or the other – that is, on the history of urban infrastructures or
on racial capitalism. But Cowen writes into view a global panoramic
through which flows of British imperial capital are seen to be connected
intimately with the development of rail infrastructure and
metropolitan space in settler-colonial Canada.
wealth creation and environmental destruction. While we recognize that corruption and anticorruption comprise fraught political and definitional terrains, we argue that the use of anticorruption contains untapped potential for social justice. Placed within the context of a rapidly
growing city and a geopolitically assertive India, the chapter considers how urban ecologies are made and remade under “advanced capitalism,” from collusion between the super-wealthy and the state, to movements for egalitarian and ultimately ethical spaces.
that are used to justify the emergence of private property as a self-evident institution, but that also reveal the violence and impunity through which property-making proceeds. We argue that this renewed attention to the genealogies of property-making takes seriously
property’s legitimation through and reliance on social difference (e.g. Blatman-Thomas
and Porter, 2019; Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Bonds, 2019; Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Dorries, Hugill and Tomiak, 2019; Ranganathan, 2016; Roy, 2017; Safransky, 2017). Drawing on theories of racial capitalism, liberalism, and colonialism, critical property research interrogates how property and race come into being in mutually constitutive ways. This special issue aims to add empirical texture and analytical specificity to the conversation on racial regimes of property across the global North and South. We start from the premise that race-making’s property histories, and conversely, property-making’s racial histories, remain underexplored in critical geography literature.
of rail infrastructure and the Canadian metropolis. She
connects the dots between the building of the Canadian Pacific
Railroad (CPR) and its nodal North American cities on the one hand,
and transatlantic finance and its bankrolling by racial slavery and
colonialism on the one hand. It is a significant enterprise to write on
one topic or the other – that is, on the history of urban infrastructures or
on racial capitalism. But Cowen writes into view a global panoramic
through which flows of British imperial capital are seen to be connected
intimately with the development of rail infrastructure and
metropolitan space in settler-colonial Canada.
wealth creation and environmental destruction. While we recognize that corruption and anticorruption comprise fraught political and definitional terrains, we argue that the use of anticorruption contains untapped potential for social justice. Placed within the context of a rapidly
growing city and a geopolitically assertive India, the chapter considers how urban ecologies are made and remade under “advanced capitalism,” from collusion between the super-wealthy and the state, to movements for egalitarian and ultimately ethical spaces.