Education
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PhD, Energy and Resources Group, with a Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Research Interests
Biography
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 member of the progressive climate policy think tank, the Climate and Community Project. Most broadly, she is a scholar of urban environmental justice, who studies the political economy of land, labor, and ecology in the context of capitalist urbanization, primarily in the cities of Bangalore and Washington, D.C. She focuses on environmental casteism and environmental racism, what she refers to as "environmental unfreedoms." Specifically, she studies how colonial, caste, and racial histories shape segregated housing, water and sanitation access, and climate vulnerability. She is currently working on two books. The first, The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor, and Environmental Politics in Bengaluru, re-examines the city of Bengaluru through the analytic of caste-class power, tracing the historical and contemporary production of housing segregation, labor exploitation, and environmental injustices, and the forms of slum, legal, and union activism that have challenged these. The second, The Long Climate Crisis: Global Political Ecologies of Caste, Race, and Migration in the Indian Ocean World, argues that we rethink the climate crisis as a labor crisis wrought by heirarchies of caste, race, and environmental vulnerability. 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 uneven 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).
Homepages
Contact Information
(202) 885-6901
