M Ranganathan
Biographic Data
| ID | 46157 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Ranganathan |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Ranganathan |
| SIGNATURE | RANGANATHAN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | American University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4787-1519 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 617 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Food as necropolitics: The starvation of Palestinian sovereignty and stakes of geopolitical ecology
Corruption plots in an age of authoritarian populism
When, in 2014, we first started thinking about what eventually became Corruption Plots, India had just seen the rise of a major anti-corruption movement that had brought a rightwing Hindu nationalist government to power. The India Against Corruption (IAC) movement, as it was known, had successfully mobilised a mix of urban middle-class voters, public interest lawyers, and corporate heads against what was understood as the massive political graft …
Gender and food systems: Are global recommendations for sustainable food systems transformation also gender transformative
Geopolitical ecology for our times
Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City
This book illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from citie…
Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City
Corruption Plots illuminates how corruption is fundamental to a global storytelling practice about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic …
South Asian Urban Climates: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons
This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. The authors analyze the terms 'mahaul,' 'mausam,' and 'aab-o-hawa' as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historical, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory, and embodied registers. The stories connect concerns about broader structural conditions ('mahaul'); local and lived experiences in different temporal registe…
Introduction to the special issue: Rethinking difference in India through racialization
The contributions in this issue forward a nuanced exposition of how the production of racial difference in India buttresses and is reproduced through Hindu nationalist, casteist, and colonial projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the articles look transnationally, examining how regional forms of racial difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long artic…
Caste, racialization, and the making of environmental unfreedoms in urban India
Caste is as an under-recognized marker of environmental inequalities in urban India, what this article names as “environmental unfreedoms” for their fundamentally humanity- and dignity-robbing traits. It argues that a theoretical framework that is attentive to the racialization of labour and property under colonial and capitalist urban relations can reveal the making of environmental unfreedoms. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Ba…
Towards a Political Ecology of Caste and the City
In this contribution, I reflect on the under-recognized role of caste and its allied notions of pollution and purity in the making of deeply inequitable, environmentally unjust, and splintered Indian cities. Published in 2001, Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism addressed the fragmented and unequal nature of infrastructure networks in the wake of globalization in cities of the Global South. Of particular interest to scholars since then has b…
Racial regimes of property: Introduction to the special issue
Coda: The Racial Ecologies of Urban Wetlands
In this coda to the intervention on slow violence and the administration of urban injustice I reflect on the role of racialization-broadly defined-in creating deeply unequal and risk-laden wetland ecologies. I identify 'racial ecologies' and 'ambivalence' as two key concepts tying together wetland politics across the contexts of Philadelphia and Mumbai. While the concept of 'racial ecologies' underscores how systems of human valuation (including …
Decolonizing the Green City: From Environmental Privilege to Emancipatory Green Justice
The expanding reach of urban greening across the United States and beyond often materially and immaterially impacts communities of color, leading to displacement and decreased access to new urban amenities. While many scholars point to the persistence of racial inequality, we observe the urban greening orthodoxy in urban planning and development as evidencing a deeper strain of environmental injustice bound up in the legacy and continuance of Whi…
Empire’s infrastructures: Racial finance capitalism and liberal necropolitics
Deborah Cowen has written an illuminating paper on the nineteenth-century making 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 h…
From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC
What would abolitionism mean for climate justice? "Resilience" is proposed by experts as a solution to climate change vulnerability. But this prescription tends to focus on adaptation to future external threats, subtly validating embedded processes of racial capitalism that have historically dehumanised and endangered residents and their environments in the first place. This article focuses on majority Black areas said to be vulnerable to extreme…
Political ecologies of dispossession and anticorruption
We examine ecological dispossession in “the Anthropocene” through the rise of anticorruption movements in urban India that in surprising ways have politicized (wet)land-grabbing as a mechanism of privatization and wealth creation. While we recognize that corruption continues to be a fraught ethico-political terrain in the post-colony with emancipatory and regressive tendencies, potential exists for radical egalitarian movements. Placed within the…
The Politics of Participation in Cape Town’s Slum Upgrading: The Role of Productive Tension
This article studies Cape Town’s new slum “reblocking” paradigm, in which settlements are reorganized, housing upgraded, and services delivered in situ. Though not without structural and long-term challenges, research shows that for those waiting for post-apartheid housing, reblocking provides an alternative to eviction and resettlement. Through primary and secondary research over 2014–2016 on four reblocking pilot projects covering six hundred h…
Towards a critical geography of corruption and power in late capitalism
Corruption politics have received little attention in human geography. We offer a critical geography of corruption as an alternative to economistic framings that take corruption as an objective set of deviant practices mostly besetting states in the Global South. Instead, we theorize corruption as a historically shifting, subjective discourse about the abuse of entrusted power. Geographic and cognate disciplinary approaches reveal how corruption …
Rule by difference: "Empire, liberalism, and the legacies of urban "improvement
From Victorian England and its colonies, to cities in South Asia today, "improvement" has long infused the language of urban planning. Through the case of Bangalore, India, this article argues that urban improvement should be understood as a project of liberal government forged in the crucible of empire and harnessed in the service of the state's capital and spatial accumulation strategies. Once practiced by colonial planners, urban improvement f…
Hydraulic politics in/beyond the world-class city
Contesting the Unethical City: Land Dispossession and Corruption Narratives in Urban India
In this age of global inequality, how people talk of corruption matters. This article examines the role of corruption narratives in struggles against land enclosures (“land grabs”) in two Indian cities. Drawing on ethnographic research on land grabs in Mumbai and Bangalore and critical corruption and geography literatures, we argue that corruption talk by slum-based and lower middle-class residents and activists advances an ethical critique of co…
Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy
The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan's water is popularly framed as a case of "environmental racism" given that Flint's population is mostly black and lower income. In this essay I argue that we see the environmental racism that underlies Flint's water poisoning not as incidental to our political-economic order, nor even as stemming from racist intent, but as inseparable from liberalism, an organizing logic we take for granted in our modern age.…
Water marginalization at the urban fringe: Environmental justice and urban political ecology across the North–South divide
This article reconsiders the epistemic and geographic boundaries that have long separated scholarship on urban water poverty and politics in the Global North and South. We stage an encounter between the seemingly dissimilar cases of Tooleville outside of the city of Exeter in California's Central Valley and Bommanahalli outside of Bangalore, India, to illuminate the geography of water marginalization at the fringes of urban areas, and to deepen c…
Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post-Colonial Bangalore
Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I "materialize" the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains-a key artifact implicated in flooding-as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation…
Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery
This article interrogates the nature of political agency deployed at sites of market-oriented water reforms. It presents a case study from Bangalore, India of a water project mandating significant 'beneficiary' cash contributions from lower-middle-class dwellers for the capital cost of extending piped water to the city's peripheries. Drawing on quantitative and ethnographic data, it illustrates why property owners who lack formal water access and…
Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy
The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan's water is popularly framed as a case of "environmental racism" given that Flint's population is mostly black and lower income. In this essay I argue that we see the environmental racism that underlies Flint's water poisoning not as incidental to our political-economic order, nor even as stemming from racist intent, but as inseparable from liberalism, an organizing logic we take for granted in our modern age.…
Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post-Colonial Bangalore
Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I "materialize" the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains-a key artifact implicated in flooding-as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation…
From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC
What would abolitionism mean for climate justice? "Resilience" is proposed by experts as a solution to climate change vulnerability. But this prescription tends to focus on adaptation to future external threats, subtly validating embedded processes of racial capitalism that have historically dehumanised and endangered residents and their environments in the first place. This article focuses on majority Black areas said to be vulnerable to extreme…
Water marginalization at the urban fringe: Environmental justice and urban political ecology across the North–South divide
This article reconsiders the epistemic and geographic boundaries that have long separated scholarship on urban water poverty and politics in the Global North and South. We stage an encounter between the seemingly dissimilar cases of Tooleville outside of the city of Exeter in California's Central Valley and Bommanahalli outside of Bangalore, India, to illuminate the geography of water marginalization at the fringes of urban areas, and to deepen c…
Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery
This article interrogates the nature of political agency deployed at sites of market-oriented water reforms. It presents a case study from Bangalore, India of a water project mandating significant 'beneficiary' cash contributions from lower-middle-class dwellers for the capital cost of extending piped water to the city's peripheries. Drawing on quantitative and ethnographic data, it illustrates why property owners who lack formal water access and…
Contesting the Unethical City: Land Dispossession and Corruption Narratives in Urban India
In this age of global inequality, how people talk of corruption matters. This article examines the role of corruption narratives in struggles against land enclosures (“land grabs”) in two Indian cities. Drawing on ethnographic research on land grabs in Mumbai and Bangalore and critical corruption and geography literatures, we argue that corruption talk by slum-based and lower middle-class residents and activists advances an ethical critique of co…
Racial regimes of property: Introduction to the special issue
Towards a critical geography of corruption and power in late capitalism
Corruption politics have received little attention in human geography. We offer a critical geography of corruption as an alternative to economistic framings that take corruption as an objective set of deviant practices mostly besetting states in the Global South. Instead, we theorize corruption as a historically shifting, subjective discourse about the abuse of entrusted power. Geographic and cognate disciplinary approaches reveal how corruption …
Rule by difference: "Empire, liberalism, and the legacies of urban "improvement
From Victorian England and its colonies, to cities in South Asia today, "improvement" has long infused the language of urban planning. Through the case of Bangalore, India, this article argues that urban improvement should be understood as a project of liberal government forged in the crucible of empire and harnessed in the service of the state's capital and spatial accumulation strategies. Once practiced by colonial planners, urban improvement f…
Empire’s infrastructures: Racial finance capitalism and liberal necropolitics
Deborah Cowen has written an illuminating paper on the nineteenth-century making 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 h…
Geopolitical ecology for our times
The Politics of Participation in Cape Town’s Slum Upgrading: The Role of Productive Tension
This article studies Cape Town’s new slum “reblocking” paradigm, in which settlements are reorganized, housing upgraded, and services delivered in situ. Though not without structural and long-term challenges, research shows that for those waiting for post-apartheid housing, reblocking provides an alternative to eviction and resettlement. Through primary and secondary research over 2014–2016 on four reblocking pilot projects covering six hundred h…
South Asian Urban Climates: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons
This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. The authors analyze the terms 'mahaul,' 'mausam,' and 'aab-o-hawa' as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historical, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory, and embodied registers. The stories connect concerns about broader structural conditions ('mahaul'); local and lived experiences in different temporal registe…
Coda: The Racial Ecologies of Urban Wetlands
In this coda to the intervention on slow violence and the administration of urban injustice I reflect on the role of racialization-broadly defined-in creating deeply unequal and risk-laden wetland ecologies. I identify 'racial ecologies' and 'ambivalence' as two key concepts tying together wetland politics across the contexts of Philadelphia and Mumbai. While the concept of 'racial ecologies' underscores how systems of human valuation (including …
Gender and food systems: Are global recommendations for sustainable food systems transformation also gender transformative
Teaching Kathak in France: The Interdisciplinary “Milieu”
This article approaches the idea of interdisciplinarity as an aspect of the globalization of pedagogical practices through the teaching of kathak dance in France. Our study positions itself in a didactic research program that tackles the question of interdisciplinarity under the theoretical angle of joint action between teacher and students (Ranganathan 2004; Ranganathan and Petrefalvi 2007; Sensevy and Mercier 2007; Loquet, Roncin, and Roesslé 2…
Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery
This article interrogates the nature of political agency deployed at sites of market-oriented water reforms. It presents a case study from Bangalore, India of a water project mandating significant 'beneficiary' cash contributions from lower-middle-class dwellers for the capital cost of extending piped water to the city's peripheries. Drawing on quantitative and ethnographic data, it illustrates why property owners who lack formal water access and…
Water marginalization at the urban fringe: Environmental justice and urban political ecology across the North–South divide
This article reconsiders the epistemic and geographic boundaries that have long separated scholarship on urban water poverty and politics in the Global North and South. We stage an encounter between the seemingly dissimilar cases of Tooleville outside of the city of Exeter in California's Central Valley and Bommanahalli outside of Bangalore, India, to illuminate the geography of water marginalization at the fringes of urban areas, and to deepen c…
Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post-Colonial Bangalore
Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I "materialize" the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains-a key artifact implicated in flooding-as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation…
Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy
The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan's water is popularly framed as a case of "environmental racism" given that Flint's population is mostly black and lower income. In this essay I argue that we see the environmental racism that underlies Flint's water poisoning not as incidental to our political-economic order, nor even as stemming from racist intent, but as inseparable from liberalism, an organizing logic we take for granted in our modern age.…
Hydraulic politics in/beyond the world-class city
Contesting the Unethical City: Land Dispossession and Corruption Narratives in Urban India
In this age of global inequality, how people talk of corruption matters. This article examines the role of corruption narratives in struggles against land enclosures (“land grabs”) in two Indian cities. Drawing on ethnographic research on land grabs in Mumbai and Bangalore and critical corruption and geography literatures, we argue that corruption talk by slum-based and lower middle-class residents and activists advances an ethical critique of co…
Political ecologies of dispossession and anticorruption
We examine ecological dispossession in “the Anthropocene” through the rise of anticorruption movements in urban India that in surprising ways have politicized (wet)land-grabbing as a mechanism of privatization and wealth creation. While we recognize that corruption continues to be a fraught ethico-political terrain in the post-colony with emancipatory and regressive tendencies, potential exists for radical egalitarian movements. Placed within the…
The Politics of Participation in Cape Town’s Slum Upgrading: The Role of Productive Tension
This article studies Cape Town’s new slum “reblocking” paradigm, in which settlements are reorganized, housing upgraded, and services delivered in situ. Though not without structural and long-term challenges, research shows that for those waiting for post-apartheid housing, reblocking provides an alternative to eviction and resettlement. Through primary and secondary research over 2014–2016 on four reblocking pilot projects covering six hundred h…
Towards a critical geography of corruption and power in late capitalism
Corruption politics have received little attention in human geography. We offer a critical geography of corruption as an alternative to economistic framings that take corruption as an objective set of deviant practices mostly besetting states in the Global South. Instead, we theorize corruption as a historically shifting, subjective discourse about the abuse of entrusted power. Geographic and cognate disciplinary approaches reveal how corruption …
Rule by difference: "Empire, liberalism, and the legacies of urban "improvement
From Victorian England and its colonies, to cities in South Asia today, "improvement" has long infused the language of urban planning. Through the case of Bangalore, India, this article argues that urban improvement should be understood as a project of liberal government forged in the crucible of empire and harnessed in the service of the state's capital and spatial accumulation strategies. Once practiced by colonial planners, urban improvement f…
Empire’s infrastructures: Racial finance capitalism and liberal necropolitics
Deborah Cowen has written an illuminating paper on the nineteenth-century making 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 h…
From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC
What would abolitionism mean for climate justice? "Resilience" is proposed by experts as a solution to climate change vulnerability. But this prescription tends to focus on adaptation to future external threats, subtly validating embedded processes of racial capitalism that have historically dehumanised and endangered residents and their environments in the first place. This article focuses on majority Black areas said to be vulnerable to extreme…
Decolonizing the Green City: From Environmental Privilege to Emancipatory Green Justice
The expanding reach of urban greening across the United States and beyond often materially and immaterially impacts communities of color, leading to displacement and decreased access to new urban amenities. While many scholars point to the persistence of racial inequality, we observe the urban greening orthodoxy in urban planning and development as evidencing a deeper strain of environmental injustice bound up in the legacy and continuance of Whi…
Introduction to the special issue: Rethinking difference in India through racialization
The contributions in this issue forward a nuanced exposition of how the production of racial difference in India buttresses and is reproduced through Hindu nationalist, casteist, and colonial projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the articles look transnationally, examining how regional forms of racial difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long artic…
Caste, racialization, and the making of environmental unfreedoms in urban India
Caste is as an under-recognized marker of environmental inequalities in urban India, what this article names as “environmental unfreedoms” for their fundamentally humanity- and dignity-robbing traits. It argues that a theoretical framework that is attentive to the racialization of labour and property under colonial and capitalist urban relations can reveal the making of environmental unfreedoms. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Ba…
Towards a Political Ecology of Caste and the City
In this contribution, I reflect on the under-recognized role of caste and its allied notions of pollution and purity in the making of deeply inequitable, environmentally unjust, and splintered Indian cities. Published in 2001, Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism addressed the fragmented and unequal nature of infrastructure networks in the wake of globalization in cities of the Global South. Of particular interest to scholars since then has b…
Racial regimes of property: Introduction to the special issue
Coda: The Racial Ecologies of Urban Wetlands
In this coda to the intervention on slow violence and the administration of urban injustice I reflect on the role of racialization-broadly defined-in creating deeply unequal and risk-laden wetland ecologies. I identify 'racial ecologies' and 'ambivalence' as two key concepts tying together wetland politics across the contexts of Philadelphia and Mumbai. While the concept of 'racial ecologies' underscores how systems of human valuation (including …
Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City
This book illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from citie…
Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City
Corruption Plots illuminates how corruption is fundamental to a global storytelling practice about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic …
South Asian Urban Climates: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons
This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. The authors analyze the terms 'mahaul,' 'mausam,' and 'aab-o-hawa' as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historical, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory, and embodied registers. The stories connect concerns about broader structural conditions ('mahaul'); local and lived experiences in different temporal registe…
Geopolitical ecology for our times
Corruption plots in an age of authoritarian populism
When, in 2014, we first started thinking about what eventually became Corruption Plots, India had just seen the rise of a major anti-corruption movement that had brought a rightwing Hindu nationalist government to power. The India Against Corruption (IAC) movement, as it was known, had successfully mobilised a mix of urban middle-class voters, public interest lawyers, and corporate heads against what was understood as the massive political graft …
Gender and food systems: Are global recommendations for sustainable food systems transformation also gender transformative
Political science (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (7 works) · Environmental ethics (6 works) · Geography (6 works)