CSSR Urban Research Hub presents a talk by Malini Ranganathan
Towards an Anticaste Epistemology for Environmental Justice in Urban India
Monday, April 15, 2024 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM EDT
Horizon Hall, 6325
In urban India, the loss of land rights, unsafe sanitation work, and flood and climate change risk—what I refer to as "environmental unfreedoms"—are structured by caste violence, Islamophobia, and gender and class hierarchies in ways that critical scholarship has yet to take stock of. Based on a book project in progress, this talk puts forth a critical caste framework for examining environmental privileges and unfreedoms rooted in a longer history of caste power, racial colonial capitalism, and Hindu majoritarianism. It draws on ethnographic research on challenges related to flooding, housing, and labor inequities that disproportionately beset lower castes, Dalits, and Muslims, particularly in a moment of rightwing nationalism. Ultimately, through learning, writing, and protesting alongside anticaste journalists, activists, workers, and union organizers in Bengaluru over the past six years, I argue that any understanding of environmental justice in urban India—and indeed globally—has to be rooted in collective and intersectional calls for dignity, liberation, and humanism. Such a reconceptualization presents a serious counter to the epistemology of mainstream liberal environmentalism.
About Malini Ranganathan:
Malini Ranganathan is Associate Professor in the Department of Environment, Development, and Health at the School of International Service and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University in Washington, DC. A critical geographer and political ecologist by training, her research on India and the U.S. studies land, labor, and environmental politics in cities, as well as intellectual histories of anticaste, anticolonial, and abolitionist thought. She is the winner of the American Association of Geographers 2023 Harold M. Rose Award for Antiracist Research and Practice and an ACLS-Mellon Collaborative Humanities Grant. She is co-author of Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Cornell Press, 2023) and co-editor of Rethinking Difference in India as Racialization (Routledge, 2022), along with over 20 peer-reviewed articles. She is currently working on two books related to caste, racialization, and the environment.
Sponsored by CSSR Urban Research Hub.
