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Katharine N Rankin

Biographic Data

ID166596
NAMEKatharine N Rankin
GIVEN NAMESKatharine N
FAMILY NAMERankin
SIGNATURERANKIN K N
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Toronto
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS26
TOTAL CITATIONS536
AUTHOR COUNT26
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2001
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX12
  • Negotiating expertise in Nepal’s post-earthquake disaster reconstruction

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin, Manoj Suji et al.•ARTICLE•Buildings and Cities•2026•References: 8

    One characteristic feature of post-earthquake recovery in Nepal after the 2015 earthquakes was an owner-driven approach to house reconstruction in the most devastated rural regions, which combined a commitment to appropriate technology and building safety. To implement the model, engineering expertise was deployed throughout the affected areas involving over 3000 engineers deployed by the government’s National Reconstruction Authority (NRA). This…

  • Between Eating and Being Fed: Competing Ethics of Community-Based Road Building in Nepal

    Katharine Rankin, Katharine N Rankin et al.•ARTICLE•Anthropological Quarterly•2024•Cited by: 1

    This paper explores locally-situated logics of ethical judgment underpinning practices of road building in Nepal, and how those logics are attuned to the challenges of navigating complex socio-political dynamics, socio-natural environments, and regional political economies. In so doing it challenges homogenizing discourses of corruption that commonly surround infrastructure development. Building on ethnographic research on rural road construction…

  • The Ethnography of Collaboration: Navigating Power Relationships in Joint Research

    Omer Aijazi, Emily Amburgey et al.•ARTICLE•Collaborative anthropologies•2021•Cited by: 11•References: 8

    We came together to write a paper on the devaluation of field researcher labor as an entry point into the broader domain of research ethics to unpack what collaboration may mean in settings of incommensurable inequality. These motivations were grounded in the materialities of our involvement within an international research project focused on post-earthquake reconstruction processes in Nepal since 2015. However, since we started writing this piec…

  • Lucrative Disaster: Financialization, Accumulation and Postearthquake Reconstruction in Nepal

    Dinesh Paudel, Katharine Rankin et al.•ARTICLE•Economic Geography•2020•Cited by: 7•References: 66

    This article investigates long-term processes of financialization unfolding in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal, engaging with literatures on financialization and political economy of disaster and development. The article probes the evolving financialized social relations in Nepal in the context of humanitarian relief and reconstruction, paying particular attention to processes through which wide-scale political economies enter into…

  • Disaster Financialization: Earthquakes, Cashflows and Shifting Household Economies in Nepal

    Open Access•Philippe Le Billon, Manoj Suji et al.•ARTICLE•Development and Change•2020•Cited by: 8•References: 50

    The political economy literature on post-disaster reconstruction tends to contrast 'disaster capitalism' narratives denouncing the predatory character of neoliberal rebuilding, and 'building back better' policies supporting market-driven reconstruction. This article seeks to provide a more nuanced account, developing the concept of 'disaster financialization' through a case study of household-level changes experienced through processes of post-ea…

  • Corruption as a Diagnostic of Power: Navigating the Blurred Boundaries of the Relational State

    Katharine N Rankin, Pushpa Hamal et al.•ARTICLE•South Asia Journal of South Asian…•2019•Cited by: 2

    In this article, we bring ethnographic insights from the contemporary moment of social and political transformation in Nepal to bear on troubling established understandings of corruption. We argue that corruption furnishes a productive site from which to interpret the relational space of state practice and to probe the ‘blurred boundaries’ of states, polities and markets in everyday lives. Reading corruption as a ‘diagnostic of power’, moreover, …

  • Fragmented Public Authority and State Un/making in the 'New' Republic of Nepal

    Open Access•Andrea J Nightingale, Anil Bhattarai et al.•ARTICLE•Modern Asian Studies•2018•Cited by: 15•References: 56

    Questions of state formation and public authority have been at the top of the development and political agenda in Nepal since 2006. The post-2006 so-called 'political transition' has been characterized by rising ethnic tensions, violence, strikes, and a bewildering kaleidoscope of leaders gaining political leverage, only to be marginalized again. In 2015, the Constitution was finally adopted following the earthquakes and amid violent protests fro…

  • Roads of change: Political transition and state formation in Nepal's agrarian districts

    Katharine N Rankin, Andrea J Nightingale et al.•ARTICLE•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2018•Cited by: 13•References: 59

    This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the di…

  • Governing the Commercial Streets of the City: New Terrains of Disinvestment and Gentrification in Toronto's Inner Suburbs

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin, Heather Mclean•ARTICLE•Antipode•2015•Cited by: 22•References: 51

    This paper explores the commercial shopping street as a site of racialized class struggle. The argument builds around the study of a disinvested inner‐suburban neighbourhood in Toronto, which furnishes an ideal case through which to achieve the paper's objectives of, first, identifying commercial space as an important site of contestation over competing suburban futures; second, delineating how processes of racialization inform the economies of c…

  • A critical geography of poverty finance

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Third World Quarterly•2013•Cited by: 23

    This paper builds a critical geography of poverty finance with recourse to a relational comparison of the microfinance and subprime mortgage markets. It probes paradoxical claims about the nature of poverty, the poor, states and markets that have surfaced in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In doing so it aims to generate new understandings of neoliberal global finance with specific emphasis on 1) the social constitution of risk through rac…

  • Commentary

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2013•Cited by: 2•References: 16

  • Subalterneity, Ethnography, and Praxis

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Annals of the Association of…•2012•References: 4

    Key Words: developmentethnographygendermasculinitypraxissubalterneity

  • Toward a more ambitious role for economic geography in response to the global financial crisis

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Dialogues in Human Geography•2011•Cited by: 1•References: 4

    Keywords economic subjectivity, G20, global financial crisis, global governance, market regulation, poststructuralist economic geography

  • Assemblage and the politics of thick description

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•City•2011•Cited by: 32•References: 14

  • The Social Space of Gentrification: The Politics of Neighbourhood Accessibility in Toronto's Downtown West

    Open Access•Katie Mazer, Katie M Mazer et al.•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning D…•2011•Cited by: 31•References: 29

    In this paper we take up the Lefebvrean challenge to disrupt the ideological mediation of social space and join it with Peter Marcuse's powerful conceptualization of displacement pressure as a call to probe the everyday life of gentrifying urban neighbourhoods. The people whose everyday lives we hope to access, however partially, are those at risk of displacement-specifically rooming-house tenants and proprietors of commercial shops providing aff…

  • Community BIAs as Practices of Assemblage: Contingent Politics in the Neoliberal City

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin, Jim Delaney•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2011•Cited by: 14•References: 32

    Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) are a domain of urban governance that has been aptly characterized as a form of neoliberal urbanization aimed at improving the business climate of downtowns. This paper engages with a growing body of literature on contingent neoliberal urbanisms to consider BIAs as an assemblage of coevolving projects and actors. It focuses specifically on two 'community' BIAs in Toronto's downtown West, where recent actions of d…

  • Reflexivity and post-colonial critique: Toward an ethics of accountability in planning praxis

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Planning Theory•2010•Cited by: 16•References: 24

    In her important essay ‘Praxis in the time of empire’, Ananya Roy (2006) calls for planning theory to confront imperialism and colonialism as the constitutive ‘present history’ of planning and to substitute a liberal ‘responsibility for’ others with a postcolonial ‘accountability to’ them. This article takes up Roy’s appeal with reference to the disciplines of anthropology, critical development studies and feminist studies. It argues that in orde…

  • Development geography: Critical development studies and political geographic imaginaries

    Open Access•Rachel Silvey, Katharine Rankin et al.•ARTICLE•Progress in Human Geography•2010•Cited by: 9•References: 16

    This article offers a selective slice into the wide-ranging scholarship in critical development studies. It reaches outside of ‘development studies’ proper to explore points of intersection and complementarity with cognate fields, and identifies promising directions for future inquiry, analysis, and practice. It attends in particular to the political geographic imaginaries that frame contestations over the 2010 G20 Summit. These struggles represe…

  • Pedagogical Contributions and Challenges in The Will to Improve

    Katharine Rankin, Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Annals of the Association of…•2010•Cited by: 1•References: 2

    Key Words: critical development studiesethnographygovernmentalitypedagogypositionality

  • Critical development studies and the praxis of planning

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•City•2009•Cited by: 6•References: 20

    Planning theory shares with critical urban theory an orientation toward normative political questions and a ‘politics of the possible’. Beyond those broad contours, however, it is fair to say that only a thin slice of planning theory takes up the normative commitments of critical urban theory: to challenge the violence of capitalism, to seek out the agents of revolutionary social change and to interrogate the ends in relation to the means of prac…

  • The Politics of Subversion in Development Practice: An Exploration of Microfinance in Nepal and Vietnam

    Yogendra Shakya, Yogendra B Shakya et al.•ARTICLE•The Journal of Development Studies•2008

    This paper considers the ways in which beneficiaries of microfinance programmes in two Asian countries routinely transgress programme protocols and regulations, and fail to conform to the entrepreneurial subjectivities the programmes seek to promote. It aims to develop an interpretive framework for these practices. Specifically, we take up Abu-Lughod's injunction to 'use resistance as a diagnostic of power' in order to explore the political ratio…

  • Manufacturing rural finance in Asia: Institutional assemblages, market societies, entrepreneurial subjects

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Geoforum•2008•Cited by: 34•References: 12

  • The Desire Called Civil Society: A Contribution to the Critique of a Bourgeois Category

    Open Access•Kanishka Goonewardena, Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Planning Theory•2004•Cited by: 6•References: 17

    How does ‘civil society’ serve the Washington Consensus while also attracting the aspirations of left political activists and progressive planners? We address this troubling question by interrogating the concept of civil society, with due respect to the actual role played by civil society in the development of capitalism. Based on close readings of Hegel, Marx and planning theory dealing with it, we also argue that the discourse of civil society …

  • Anthropologies and geographies of globalization

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Progress in Human Geography•2003•Cited by: 19•References: 47

    Anthropologists and geographers are increasingly tuming to one another for tools to analyze the present global political-economic conjuncture. Yet to date there has been no adequate accounting of the comparative advantages each field brings to studies of globalization Anthropology with its emphasis on the role of culture in anchoring (or resisting) globalizing processes within particular societies and Geography with its more comparative emphasis …

  • Cultures of Economies: Gender and socio-spatial change in Nepal

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Gender Place & Culture•2003•Cited by: 24•References: 10

    This article contributes to ongoing debates animating geography today about the boundaries between 'economy' and 'culture' and their implication for policy planning. It explores the mutual embeddedness of culture and economy through an ethnographic analysis of the interrelationships between spatial practices, economic strategies and gendered symbols of status in Nepal. The fine-grained ethnographic analysis presented here is intended specifically…

Next
  • Governing development: Neoliberalism, Microcredit, and Rational Economic Woman

    Katharine N Rankin•REVIEW•Economy and Society•2001•Cited by: 239•References: 5

    This paper addresses the emergence of microcredit programmes as a preferred strategy for poverty alleviation world-wide. Taking the paradigmatic case of Nepal, it engages a genealogical approach to trace how Nepalese planners' enduring concerns about rural development intersect in surprising (and gendered) ways with donors' present focus on deepening financial markets. In the resulting microcredit model, the onus for rural lending is devolved fro…

  • Manufacturing rural finance in Asia: Institutional assemblages, market societies, entrepreneurial subjects

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Geoforum•2008•Cited by: 34•References: 12

  • Assemblage and the politics of thick description

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•City•2011•Cited by: 32•References: 14

  • The Social Space of Gentrification: The Politics of Neighbourhood Accessibility in Toronto's Downtown West

    Open Access•Katie Mazer, Katie M Mazer et al.•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning D…•2011•Cited by: 31•References: 29

    In this paper we take up the Lefebvrean challenge to disrupt the ideological mediation of social space and join it with Peter Marcuse's powerful conceptualization of displacement pressure as a call to probe the everyday life of gentrifying urban neighbourhoods. The people whose everyday lives we hope to access, however partially, are those at risk of displacement-specifically rooming-house tenants and proprietors of commercial shops providing aff…

  • Cultures of Economies: Gender and socio-spatial change in Nepal

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Gender Place & Culture•2003•Cited by: 24•References: 10

    This article contributes to ongoing debates animating geography today about the boundaries between 'economy' and 'culture' and their implication for policy planning. It explores the mutual embeddedness of culture and economy through an ethnographic analysis of the interrelationships between spatial practices, economic strategies and gendered symbols of status in Nepal. The fine-grained ethnographic analysis presented here is intended specifically…

  • A critical geography of poverty finance

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Third World Quarterly•2013•Cited by: 23

    This paper builds a critical geography of poverty finance with recourse to a relational comparison of the microfinance and subprime mortgage markets. It probes paradoxical claims about the nature of poverty, the poor, states and markets that have surfaced in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In doing so it aims to generate new understandings of neoliberal global finance with specific emphasis on 1) the social constitution of risk through rac…

  • Governing the Commercial Streets of the City: New Terrains of Disinvestment and Gentrification in Toronto's Inner Suburbs

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin, Heather Mclean•ARTICLE•Antipode•2015•Cited by: 22•References: 51

    This paper explores the commercial shopping street as a site of racialized class struggle. The argument builds around the study of a disinvested inner‐suburban neighbourhood in Toronto, which furnishes an ideal case through which to achieve the paper's objectives of, first, identifying commercial space as an important site of contestation over competing suburban futures; second, delineating how processes of racialization inform the economies of c…

  • Anthropologies and geographies of globalization

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Progress in Human Geography•2003•Cited by: 19•References: 47

    Anthropologists and geographers are increasingly tuming to one another for tools to analyze the present global political-economic conjuncture. Yet to date there has been no adequate accounting of the comparative advantages each field brings to studies of globalization Anthropology with its emphasis on the role of culture in anchoring (or resisting) globalizing processes within particular societies and Geography with its more comparative emphasis …

  • Reflexivity and post-colonial critique: Toward an ethics of accountability in planning praxis

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Planning Theory•2010•Cited by: 16•References: 24

    In her important essay ‘Praxis in the time of empire’, Ananya Roy (2006) calls for planning theory to confront imperialism and colonialism as the constitutive ‘present history’ of planning and to substitute a liberal ‘responsibility for’ others with a postcolonial ‘accountability to’ them. This article takes up Roy’s appeal with reference to the disciplines of anthropology, critical development studies and feminist studies. It argues that in orde…

  • Fragmented Public Authority and State Un/making in the 'New' Republic of Nepal

    Open Access•Andrea J Nightingale, Anil Bhattarai et al.•ARTICLE•Modern Asian Studies•2018•Cited by: 15•References: 56

    Questions of state formation and public authority have been at the top of the development and political agenda in Nepal since 2006. The post-2006 so-called 'political transition' has been characterized by rising ethnic tensions, violence, strikes, and a bewildering kaleidoscope of leaders gaining political leverage, only to be marginalized again. In 2015, the Constitution was finally adopted following the earthquakes and amid violent protests fro…

  • Community BIAs as Practices of Assemblage: Contingent Politics in the Neoliberal City

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin, Jim Delaney•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2011•Cited by: 14•References: 32

    Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) are a domain of urban governance that has been aptly characterized as a form of neoliberal urbanization aimed at improving the business climate of downtowns. This paper engages with a growing body of literature on contingent neoliberal urbanisms to consider BIAs as an assemblage of coevolving projects and actors. It focuses specifically on two 'community' BIAs in Toronto's downtown West, where recent actions of d…

  • Roads of change: Political transition and state formation in Nepal's agrarian districts

    Katharine N Rankin, Andrea J Nightingale et al.•ARTICLE•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2018•Cited by: 13•References: 59

    This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the di…

  • The Ethnography of Collaboration: Navigating Power Relationships in Joint Research

    Omer Aijazi, Emily Amburgey et al.•ARTICLE•Collaborative anthropologies•2021•Cited by: 11•References: 8

    We came together to write a paper on the devaluation of field researcher labor as an entry point into the broader domain of research ethics to unpack what collaboration may mean in settings of incommensurable inequality. These motivations were grounded in the materialities of our involvement within an international research project focused on post-earthquake reconstruction processes in Nepal since 2015. However, since we started writing this piec…

  • Development geography: Critical development studies and political geographic imaginaries

    Open Access•Rachel Silvey, Katharine Rankin et al.•ARTICLE•Progress in Human Geography•2010•Cited by: 9•References: 16

    This article offers a selective slice into the wide-ranging scholarship in critical development studies. It reaches outside of ‘development studies’ proper to explore points of intersection and complementarity with cognate fields, and identifies promising directions for future inquiry, analysis, and practice. It attends in particular to the political geographic imaginaries that frame contestations over the 2010 G20 Summit. These struggles represe…

  • Disaster Financialization: Earthquakes, Cashflows and Shifting Household Economies in Nepal

    Open Access•Philippe Le Billon, Manoj Suji et al.•ARTICLE•Development and Change•2020•Cited by: 8•References: 50

    The political economy literature on post-disaster reconstruction tends to contrast 'disaster capitalism' narratives denouncing the predatory character of neoliberal rebuilding, and 'building back better' policies supporting market-driven reconstruction. This article seeks to provide a more nuanced account, developing the concept of 'disaster financialization' through a case study of household-level changes experienced through processes of post-ea…

  • Lucrative Disaster: Financialization, Accumulation and Postearthquake Reconstruction in Nepal

    Dinesh Paudel, Katharine Rankin et al.•ARTICLE•Economic Geography•2020•Cited by: 7•References: 66

    This article investigates long-term processes of financialization unfolding in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal, engaging with literatures on financialization and political economy of disaster and development. The article probes the evolving financialized social relations in Nepal in the context of humanitarian relief and reconstruction, paying particular attention to processes through which wide-scale political economies enter into…

  • Critical development studies and the praxis of planning

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•City•2009•Cited by: 6•References: 20

    Planning theory shares with critical urban theory an orientation toward normative political questions and a ‘politics of the possible’. Beyond those broad contours, however, it is fair to say that only a thin slice of planning theory takes up the normative commitments of critical urban theory: to challenge the violence of capitalism, to seek out the agents of revolutionary social change and to interrogate the ends in relation to the means of prac…

  • The Desire Called Civil Society: A Contribution to the Critique of a Bourgeois Category

    Open Access•Kanishka Goonewardena, Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Planning Theory•2004•Cited by: 6•References: 17

    How does ‘civil society’ serve the Washington Consensus while also attracting the aspirations of left political activists and progressive planners? We address this troubling question by interrogating the concept of civil society, with due respect to the actual role played by civil society in the development of capitalism. Based on close readings of Hegel, Marx and planning theory dealing with it, we also argue that the discourse of civil society …

  • Corruption as a Diagnostic of Power: Navigating the Blurred Boundaries of the Relational State

    Katharine N Rankin, Pushpa Hamal et al.•ARTICLE•South Asia Journal of South Asian…•2019•Cited by: 2

    In this article, we bring ethnographic insights from the contemporary moment of social and political transformation in Nepal to bear on troubling established understandings of corruption. We argue that corruption furnishes a productive site from which to interpret the relational space of state practice and to probe the ‘blurred boundaries’ of states, polities and markets in everyday lives. Reading corruption as a ‘diagnostic of power’, moreover, …

  • Commentary

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2013•Cited by: 2•References: 16

  • Between Eating and Being Fed: Competing Ethics of Community-Based Road Building in Nepal

    Katharine Rankin, Katharine N Rankin et al.•ARTICLE•Anthropological Quarterly•2024•Cited by: 1

    This paper explores locally-situated logics of ethical judgment underpinning practices of road building in Nepal, and how those logics are attuned to the challenges of navigating complex socio-political dynamics, socio-natural environments, and regional political economies. In so doing it challenges homogenizing discourses of corruption that commonly surround infrastructure development. Building on ethnographic research on rural road construction…

  • Toward a more ambitious role for economic geography in response to the global financial crisis

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Dialogues in Human Geography•2011•Cited by: 1•References: 4

    Keywords economic subjectivity, G20, global financial crisis, global governance, market regulation, poststructuralist economic geography

  • Pedagogical Contributions and Challenges in The Will to Improve

    Katharine Rankin, Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Annals of the Association of…•2010•Cited by: 1•References: 2

    Key Words: critical development studiesethnographygovernmentalitypedagogypositionality

  • Governing development: Neoliberalism, Microcredit, and Rational Economic Woman

    Katharine N Rankin•REVIEW•Economy and Society•2001•Cited by: 239•References: 5

    This paper addresses the emergence of microcredit programmes as a preferred strategy for poverty alleviation world-wide. Taking the paradigmatic case of Nepal, it engages a genealogical approach to trace how Nepalese planners' enduring concerns about rural development intersect in surprising (and gendered) ways with donors' present focus on deepening financial markets. In the resulting microcredit model, the onus for rural lending is devolved fro…

  • Anthropologies and geographies of globalization

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Progress in Human Geography•2003•Cited by: 19•References: 47

    Anthropologists and geographers are increasingly tuming to one another for tools to analyze the present global political-economic conjuncture. Yet to date there has been no adequate accounting of the comparative advantages each field brings to studies of globalization Anthropology with its emphasis on the role of culture in anchoring (or resisting) globalizing processes within particular societies and Geography with its more comparative emphasis …

  • Cultures of Economies: Gender and socio-spatial change in Nepal

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Gender Place & Culture•2003•Cited by: 24•References: 10

    This article contributes to ongoing debates animating geography today about the boundaries between 'economy' and 'culture' and their implication for policy planning. It explores the mutual embeddedness of culture and economy through an ethnographic analysis of the interrelationships between spatial practices, economic strategies and gendered symbols of status in Nepal. The fine-grained ethnographic analysis presented here is intended specifically…

  • The Desire Called Civil Society: A Contribution to the Critique of a Bourgeois Category

    Open Access•Kanishka Goonewardena, Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Planning Theory•2004•Cited by: 6•References: 17

    How does ‘civil society’ serve the Washington Consensus while also attracting the aspirations of left political activists and progressive planners? We address this troubling question by interrogating the concept of civil society, with due respect to the actual role played by civil society in the development of capitalism. Based on close readings of Hegel, Marx and planning theory dealing with it, we also argue that the discourse of civil society …

  • The Politics of Subversion in Development Practice: An Exploration of Microfinance in Nepal and Vietnam

    Yogendra Shakya, Yogendra B Shakya et al.•ARTICLE•The Journal of Development Studies•2008

    This paper considers the ways in which beneficiaries of microfinance programmes in two Asian countries routinely transgress programme protocols and regulations, and fail to conform to the entrepreneurial subjectivities the programmes seek to promote. It aims to develop an interpretive framework for these practices. Specifically, we take up Abu-Lughod's injunction to 'use resistance as a diagnostic of power' in order to explore the political ratio…

  • Manufacturing rural finance in Asia: Institutional assemblages, market societies, entrepreneurial subjects

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Geoforum•2008•Cited by: 34•References: 12

  • Critical development studies and the praxis of planning

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•City•2009•Cited by: 6•References: 20

    Planning theory shares with critical urban theory an orientation toward normative political questions and a ‘politics of the possible’. Beyond those broad contours, however, it is fair to say that only a thin slice of planning theory takes up the normative commitments of critical urban theory: to challenge the violence of capitalism, to seek out the agents of revolutionary social change and to interrogate the ends in relation to the means of prac…

  • Reflexivity and post-colonial critique: Toward an ethics of accountability in planning praxis

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Planning Theory•2010•Cited by: 16•References: 24

    In her important essay ‘Praxis in the time of empire’, Ananya Roy (2006) calls for planning theory to confront imperialism and colonialism as the constitutive ‘present history’ of planning and to substitute a liberal ‘responsibility for’ others with a postcolonial ‘accountability to’ them. This article takes up Roy’s appeal with reference to the disciplines of anthropology, critical development studies and feminist studies. It argues that in orde…

  • Development geography: Critical development studies and political geographic imaginaries

    Open Access•Rachel Silvey, Katharine Rankin et al.•ARTICLE•Progress in Human Geography•2010•Cited by: 9•References: 16

    This article offers a selective slice into the wide-ranging scholarship in critical development studies. It reaches outside of ‘development studies’ proper to explore points of intersection and complementarity with cognate fields, and identifies promising directions for future inquiry, analysis, and practice. It attends in particular to the political geographic imaginaries that frame contestations over the 2010 G20 Summit. These struggles represe…

  • Pedagogical Contributions and Challenges in The Will to Improve

    Katharine Rankin, Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Annals of the Association of…•2010•Cited by: 1•References: 2

    Key Words: critical development studiesethnographygovernmentalitypedagogypositionality

  • Toward a more ambitious role for economic geography in response to the global financial crisis

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Dialogues in Human Geography•2011•Cited by: 1•References: 4

    Keywords economic subjectivity, G20, global financial crisis, global governance, market regulation, poststructuralist economic geography

  • Assemblage and the politics of thick description

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•City•2011•Cited by: 32•References: 14

  • The Social Space of Gentrification: The Politics of Neighbourhood Accessibility in Toronto's Downtown West

    Open Access•Katie Mazer, Katie M Mazer et al.•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning D…•2011•Cited by: 31•References: 29

    In this paper we take up the Lefebvrean challenge to disrupt the ideological mediation of social space and join it with Peter Marcuse's powerful conceptualization of displacement pressure as a call to probe the everyday life of gentrifying urban neighbourhoods. The people whose everyday lives we hope to access, however partially, are those at risk of displacement-specifically rooming-house tenants and proprietors of commercial shops providing aff…

  • Community BIAs as Practices of Assemblage: Contingent Politics in the Neoliberal City

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin, Jim Delaney•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2011•Cited by: 14•References: 32

    Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) are a domain of urban governance that has been aptly characterized as a form of neoliberal urbanization aimed at improving the business climate of downtowns. This paper engages with a growing body of literature on contingent neoliberal urbanisms to consider BIAs as an assemblage of coevolving projects and actors. It focuses specifically on two 'community' BIAs in Toronto's downtown West, where recent actions of d…

  • Subalterneity, Ethnography, and Praxis

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Annals of the Association of…•2012•References: 4

    Key Words: developmentethnographygendermasculinitypraxissubalterneity

  • A critical geography of poverty finance

    Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Third World Quarterly•2013•Cited by: 23

    This paper builds a critical geography of poverty finance with recourse to a relational comparison of the microfinance and subprime mortgage markets. It probes paradoxical claims about the nature of poverty, the poor, states and markets that have surfaced in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In doing so it aims to generate new understandings of neoliberal global finance with specific emphasis on 1) the social constitution of risk through rac…

  • Commentary

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2013•Cited by: 2•References: 16

  • Governing the Commercial Streets of the City: New Terrains of Disinvestment and Gentrification in Toronto's Inner Suburbs

    Open Access•Katharine N Rankin, Heather Mclean•ARTICLE•Antipode•2015•Cited by: 22•References: 51

    This paper explores the commercial shopping street as a site of racialized class struggle. The argument builds around the study of a disinvested inner‐suburban neighbourhood in Toronto, which furnishes an ideal case through which to achieve the paper's objectives of, first, identifying commercial space as an important site of contestation over competing suburban futures; second, delineating how processes of racialization inform the economies of c…

  • Fragmented Public Authority and State Un/making in the 'New' Republic of Nepal

    Open Access•Andrea J Nightingale, Anil Bhattarai et al.•ARTICLE•Modern Asian Studies•2018•Cited by: 15•References: 56

    Questions of state formation and public authority have been at the top of the development and political agenda in Nepal since 2006. The post-2006 so-called 'political transition' has been characterized by rising ethnic tensions, violence, strikes, and a bewildering kaleidoscope of leaders gaining political leverage, only to be marginalized again. In 2015, the Constitution was finally adopted following the earthquakes and amid violent protests fro…

  • Roads of change: Political transition and state formation in Nepal's agrarian districts

    Katharine N Rankin, Andrea J Nightingale et al.•ARTICLE•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2018•Cited by: 13•References: 59

    This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the di…

  • Corruption as a Diagnostic of Power: Navigating the Blurred Boundaries of the Relational State

    Katharine N Rankin, Pushpa Hamal et al.•ARTICLE•South Asia Journal of South Asian…•2019•Cited by: 2

    In this article, we bring ethnographic insights from the contemporary moment of social and political transformation in Nepal to bear on troubling established understandings of corruption. We argue that corruption furnishes a productive site from which to interpret the relational space of state practice and to probe the ‘blurred boundaries’ of states, polities and markets in everyday lives. Reading corruption as a ‘diagnostic of power’, moreover, …

  • Lucrative Disaster: Financialization, Accumulation and Postearthquake Reconstruction in Nepal

    Dinesh Paudel, Katharine Rankin et al.•ARTICLE•Economic Geography•2020•Cited by: 7•References: 66

    This article investigates long-term processes of financialization unfolding in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal, engaging with literatures on financialization and political economy of disaster and development. The article probes the evolving financialized social relations in Nepal in the context of humanitarian relief and reconstruction, paying particular attention to processes through which wide-scale political economies enter into…

  • Disaster Financialization: Earthquakes, Cashflows and Shifting Household Economies in Nepal

    Open Access•Philippe Le Billon, Manoj Suji et al.•ARTICLE•Development and Change•2020•Cited by: 8•References: 50

    The political economy literature on post-disaster reconstruction tends to contrast 'disaster capitalism' narratives denouncing the predatory character of neoliberal rebuilding, and 'building back better' policies supporting market-driven reconstruction. This article seeks to provide a more nuanced account, developing the concept of 'disaster financialization' through a case study of household-level changes experienced through processes of post-ea…

  • The Ethnography of Collaboration: Navigating Power Relationships in Joint Research

    Omer Aijazi, Emily Amburgey et al.•ARTICLE•Collaborative anthropologies•2021•Cited by: 11•References: 8

    We came together to write a paper on the devaluation of field researcher labor as an entry point into the broader domain of research ethics to unpack what collaboration may mean in settings of incommensurable inequality. These motivations were grounded in the materialities of our involvement within an international research project focused on post-earthquake reconstruction processes in Nepal since 2015. However, since we started writing this piec…

  • Between Eating and Being Fed: Competing Ethics of Community-Based Road Building in Nepal

    Katharine Rankin, Katharine N Rankin et al.•ARTICLE•Anthropological Quarterly•2024•Cited by: 1

    This paper explores locally-situated logics of ethical judgment underpinning practices of road building in Nepal, and how those logics are attuned to the challenges of navigating complex socio-political dynamics, socio-natural environments, and regional political economies. In so doing it challenges homogenizing discourses of corruption that commonly surround infrastructure development. Building on ethnographic research on rural road construction…

Political science (23 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Economics (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Geography (11 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (8 works) · Social science (8 works)

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