Malini Ranganathan Associate Professor Environment, Development & Health
- Additional Positions at AU
- Faculty Affiliate, Antiracist Research and Policy Center
- Faculty Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Center, School of Public Affairs
- Faculty Affiliate, Center for Environment, Community, and Equity
- Degrees
- PhD, University of California, Berkeley
- Bio
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Malini Ranganathan is Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University, and a political ecologist and geographer by training. She is a faculty affiliate of three university centers, and is also a fellow at the progressive climate policy think tank, the Climate and Community Institute. Most broadly, she is a scholar of environmental justice, who studies the political economy of land, labor, and ecology in the context of capitalist development. She works primarily on the cities of Bangalore and Washington, D.C., focusing on what she terms "environmental unfreedoms." Specifically, she studies how colonial, caste, and racial histories shape housing and land rights, labor politics, and climate and water inequities. She is currently working on two books. The first, The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor, and Environmental Politics in Bengaluru, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. It re-examines the city of Bengaluru through the analytic of caste power, tracing the historical and contemporary production of land dispossession, labor exploitation, and environmental casteism. Through activist narratives and translations of a Kannada-language slum magazine, it also discusses the forms of slum, legal, and union resistance that have challenged these. The second is The Climate of Labor Justice: Planetary Ecologies of Racial Capitalism, Caste, and Freedom. Training our attention on southern India and the Indian Ocean World and migratory connections between the two regions, the book argues that we rethink the climate crisis as inseparable from a labor crisis stretching from the colonial to contemporary era. It draws on Asian diasporic labor history to show that idioms of freedom, dignity, and self-respect can shape a left, internationalist pro-labor climate justice movement. She is co-author of Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Cornell Press, 2023, Yoda Press 2024). The book weaves together ethnographic and literary analysis to argue, against the grain, that "corruption talk" serves as a means for various publics to narrate unequal and rapid urban development. It is deployed beyond narrow legal definitions to condemn land grabs, ecologically-risky development, and housing evictions perpetrated by elites, even as it is used opportunistically to deflect blame onto marginalized others. She is also co-editor of Rethinking Difference in India as Racialization: Caste, Tribe, and Hindu Nationalism in Transnational Perspective. Finally, Dr. Ranganathan investigates environmental unfreedoms and climate justice in American cities. Her work on abolitionist climate justice in Washington, D.C. was featured on NPR. She is part of two AU research teams: one that was awarded a National Science Foundation grant for RECIPES, a project that promotes sustainable food systems, and a second investigating Climate Story Gaps in Washington, D.C. For an overview of her transnational approach to research and teaching, stream this podcast. In 2023, Dr Ranganathan was recognized with the Harold M. Rose Award for Antiracism Research and Practice from the American Association of Geographers. In 2020 and 2021 she won the SIS and university-wide awards respectively for Outstanding Contributions to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In 2022 she won the AU Morton-Bender Prize for achievements at the associate professor level. She won an American Council of Learned Societies-Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant in 2017-2019. Please visit her website to learn more about her research.
Her research is published in EP:D (Society and Space), Environmental Justice, Ethnic and Racial Studies, The Lancet - Global Health, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Environment and Planning: A (Economy and Society), Capitalism Nature Socialism, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Geography, and Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, among other journals. Her scholarship also appears in public venues such as e-Flux Architecture, Society and Space, and Black Perspectives. She serves on the editorial boards of Antipode, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Environment and Planning: D (Society and Space). Previously, Dr Ranganathan was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and has had research positions at TERI in New Delhi, ENDA-Tiers Monde in Dakar, and the Asian Development Bank in Manila. At SIS, Dr Ranganathan teaches SISU 250 (Environmental Sustainability and Global Health), SISU 349 (Global Cities, Justice, and the Environment), and SIS 620 (Environmental Justice).
- See Also
- 2024 Talk - The Long Climate Crisis: Global Political Ecologies of Caste, Race, and Migration
- 2023 Report - No Climate Justice Without Palestinian Freedom and Self-Determination
- 2023 Book - Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City
- 2022 Book - Rethinking Difference in India Through Racialization
- 2022 Washington Post article on flooding and real estate corruption
- For the Media
- To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.
Teaching
Spring 2024
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HNRS-398 Honors Challenge Course
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SIS-620 Stds in Global Envirn Politics: Environmental Justice
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SIS-899 Doctoral Dissertation
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SISU-250 Env Sustainblty/Global Health
Partnerships & Affiliations
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Metropolitan Policy Center
Faculty Fellow -
Antiracist Research and Policy Center
Faculty Affiliate -
Center for Environment, Community, and Equity
Faculty Affiliate
Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities
Selected Publications
Books
- In-progress. The Climate of Labor Justice: Planetary Ecologies of Racial Capitalism, Caste, and Freedom.
- Forthcoming. The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor, and Environmental Politics in Bangalore. Cambridge University Press (with KJ Siddharth and IA Selva).
- 2023. Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City. Cornell University Press and Yoda Press, India (with D Pike and S Doshi).
- 2022. Rethinking Difference in India Through Racialization: Caste, Tribe, and Hindu Nationalism in Transnational Perspective. Routledge (with JF Cháirez-Garza, MD Gergan, and P Vasudevan (Eds)).
Selected Journal Publications
- 2024 "Geopolitical Ecologies for Our Times." Political Geography 112 (with G Graddy-Lovelace).
- 2023. "Urban Climates: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons."International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 47 (4): 667-687 (with N Rahman and others).
- 2022. "Coda: The Racial Ecologies of Wetlands," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 46 (4): 721-724
- 2022. "Racial Regimes of Property: An Introduction," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 40 (2): 197-207 (with A Bonds).
- 2022. "Towards a Political Ecology of Caste and the City", Journal of Urban Technology 29 (1): 135-143.
- 2022. "Rethinking Difference in India Through Racialization: An Introduction", Ethnic and Racial Studies 45 (2): 193-215 (with JF Cháirez-Garza, MD Gergan, and P Vasudevan).
- 2022. "Caste, Racialization, and the Making of Environmental Unfreedoms in Urban India," Ethnic and Racial Studies 45 (2): 257-277.
- 2022. "Decolonizing the Green City: From Environmental Privilege to Emancipatory Green Justice", Environmental Justice 15 (1): 1-11 (with I Anguelovski, A Brand, and D Hyra).
- 2021. "The Racial Inequalities of Green Gentrification in Washington, DC" (with I Anguelovski and D Hyra) in I Anguelovski and J Connolly (eds) The Green City and Social Injustice: 21 Tales from North America and Europe. New York: Routledge.
- 2021. "Time to Take Critical Race Theory Seriously: Moving Beyond a Colorblind Gender Lens in Global Health", The Lancet - Global Health (with E Yam, M Silva, J White, T Hope, C Ford).
- 2021. "From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC" (with E Bratman). Antipode 53 (1): 115-137.
- 2020. "Empire’s Infrastructures: Racial Finance Capitalism and Liberal Necropolitics", Urban Geography 41 (4): 492-496.
- 2019. "Towards a Critical Geography of Corruption and Power in Late Capitalism" (with S Doshi). Progress in Human Geography 43 (3) 436-457.
- 2018. "Beyond Third World Comparisons: America's Geography of Water, Race, and Poverty". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Spotlight Series on Parched Cities.
- 2018. "Rule By Difference: Empire, Liberalism, and the Legacies of Urban 'Improvement'". Environment and Planning: A (Economy and Space) 50 (7): 1386–1406. See media coverage "Legacies of Colonial Urban Planning in Bangalore"
- 2017. "The Environment as Freedom: A Decolonial Reimagining. Social Science Research Council Items, reprinted in Black Perspectives, African American Intellectual History Society blog.
- 2017. "The Color of Corruption: Whiteness and Populist Narratives" (with S Doshi). Society and Space, the blog for the journal Environment and Planning: D.
- 2017. "Contesting the Unethical City: Land Dispossession and Corruption Narratives in Urban India" (with S Doshi). Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107 (1): 183-199.
- 2016. "Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy". Capitalism Nature Socialism 27 (3): 17-33.
Professional Presentations
INVITED KEYNOTES (only recent)
- 2024. "The Long Climate Crisis: Global Political Ecologies of Caste, Race, and Migration." Invited to give the 2024 Institute for Behavioral Studies colloquium at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
- 2022. "Political Ecologies of Caste and Racial Capitalism: Remapping a Planetary Humanism." Invited to give the 2022 Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference Keynote.
- 2021. "Abolition and Climate Justice in Transnational Perspective." Invited to the "Abolitionist and Emancipatory Futures: Antiracist Struggles and Climate Justice" panel, part of the Global Black Lives Matter Series at the University of California, Los Angeles.
- 2019. "Towards an Anticaste and Abolitionist Epistemology for Environmental Justice in Urban India". Invited to give the keynote lecture at the "Urban Climates: Power, Development, and Environment in South Asia" conference, Dartmouth College.
- 2019. "The Environment as Freedom: Racial Capitalism and Environmental Justice". Invited to speak at the Mellon Research Initiative in Racial Capitalism at the University of California, Davis.
- 2019. "The Environment as Freedom: Decolonizing Urban Property, Reimagining Justice". Invited to give the annual honorary John Treacy Memorial Lecture (voted on as a "renowned pre-tenure scholar" by Geography graduate students) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
CONFERENCE PAPERS AND PANELS (only recent)
- 2024. "Money, Muscle, and Moral Power: Middle Agrarian Castes and Land Grabs in Bengaluru," Conference on "Caste, Capitalism, and the City". Princeton University.
- 2024. "Caste, Racial Capitalism, and Anticolonial Labor Politics in the Indian Ocean World,"Workshop on "Caste, Race, and Indigeneity in/beyond South Asia: Dismantling the Master’s House". University of Cincinnati.
- 2020. "Confronting Caste I: Caste and the City," organized by King's College London
- 2020. "Anticaste Ecological Politics", organized by Suraj Yengde for Dialogics
Multimedia
- 2022. "Theorizing City, Capital, and Caste from the Ground Up," Society and Space.
- 2022. "Urban flooding has everything to do with real estate corruption," Washington Post Monkey Cage Blog.
- 2022. "Contract workers in PSUs–marginalised castes, women, main victims of discrimination," Citizen Matters.
- 2021. "At Indian Telephone Industries in Bengaluru, Workers Fight a Battle Seen Across the Public Sector," The Wire.
- 2020. "Caste and the City," King's College London's Series Confronting Caste.
- 2020. "Climate Justice," SIS Local to Global.
- 2020. "Anticaste Ecological Politics," Dialogics.
- 2020. "What it Means to be Antiracist", Vox.com.
- 2019. "Climate Change Won't Affect All Washingtonians Equally." DCist, September 19, 2019.
- 2019. "Marginalized Communities In D.C. Are Already Struggling. Climate Change Will Make That Worse". Kojo Nnamdi Show, WAMU 88.5, September 17, 2019.
- 2019. "Decolonizing Infrastructure in India and the United States: An Interview with Malini Ranganathan", EDGE Effects, Center for Culture, History, and the Environment, University of Wisconsin, Madison, June 4, 2019.
- 2019. "Climate Justice in Washington, DC", SIS Breaks it Down.
Professional Services
Grants and Sponsored Research
- 2024-2026. A Critical Legal Geography of Caste, Land, and the Commons in Bengaluru. Senior Fellowship, American Institute for Indian Studies (AIIS).
- 2024-2025. The Climate Story Gaps Project: Locating Untold Climate Intersections in Washington, D.C. Project funded by the AU Center for Environment, Community, and Equity (part of a team with R Donald, A Sahejpal, and W Lowery).
- 2021-2026. National Science Foundation Grant, RECIPES, focused on sustainable and equitable food systems (part of a team led by AU faculty S Siddiqui)
- 2018-2019. Antipode Foundation International Workshop Award for "Rethinking Difference in India: Racialization in Transnational Perspective" (with J Cháirez-Garza, M Gergan, and P Vasudevan).
- 2017-2019. American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)-Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Research Grant "Corruption Plots, Imagined Publics: The Ethics of Space in the Millennial City" (with S Doshi and D Pike).
- 2016-2017. Faculty Research Support Grant "Urban Revolution? Anti-Corruption and Environmental Justice in India".
- 2015-2016. Metropolitan Policy Center Faculty Research Grant "Tackling Urban Vulnerability: Lessons for Building Community Resilience and Climate Justice in Washington, DC" (with E Bratman).
Honors, Awards, and Fellowships
- 2023. American Association of Geographers Harold M. Rose Award for Antiracism Research and Practice
- 2022. American University Morton-Bender Prize, recognizing "professional achievement since attainment of the rank of associate professor and to facilitate the faculty member's progress towards the rank of full professor"
- 2021. American University Faculty Award for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
- 2020. SIS Outstanding Contributions to Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award
- 2018. SIS Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award (co-recipient)
- 2011-2013. Post-Doctoral Fellow, Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy (SDEP), Department of Geography and Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- 2009-2010. Chancellor’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of California, Berkeley
- 2007-2008. John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellowship in International and Comparative Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Research Interests
Urban activism around housing, land, and labor rights; Global climate justice; Transnational movements against casteism and racism; Third World Internationalism; Environmental justice and political ecology in India and the U.S., Black Marxism, Decolonial and postcolonial theory and epistemology, Critical Race Theory, Feminist theory.
AU Experts
Area of Expertise
Environmental racism in the U.S., antiracism, climate justice, environmental justice, segregation, environmental politics in India
Additional Information
Malini Ranganathan is an urban geographer and political ecologist whose research focuses on environmental justice, land and real estate politics, and climate change vulnerability in India and the U.S. She is a co-author of the book Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City published by Cornell University Press and co-editor of Rethinking Difference in in India through Racialization published by Routledge Press. She has also authored several academic journal articles and is currently working on two book manuscripts related to caste, race, and urban environmental and social justice. Her work appears in media and scholarly outlets such as the Washington Post, WAMU, Vox, Black Perspectives, and Society and Space. She is the winner of the 2023 American Association of Geographers Harold M. Rose Award for Antiracist Research and Practice and the 2022 American University Morton-Bender Prize for outstanding achievement at the associate professor level.
For the Media
To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.