Welcome to my website and thanks for visiting! I am Associate Professor in the Department of Environment, Development, and Health (EDH) at the School of International Service (SIS) at American University in Washington, DC, where I teach graduate and undergraduate courses on international development, sustainability, global health, and environmental justice through the lenses of critical geography, development studies, anticaste theory, and decolonial and critical race theory. I am also a fellow at the progressive climate policy think tank, the Climate and Community Institute. Finally, I am faculty affiliate of the following centers on AU’s campus: the Metropolitan Policy Center in the School of Public Affairs, the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity, the Antiracist Research and Policy Center, and the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Most broadly, I am a scholar of environmental justice. I am interested in the political economy of land, labor, and ecology in the context of capitalist urbanization. I study environmental justice politics in both US and India. As a critical urban geographer and political ecologist trained in qualitative and spatial methodology, I am motivated by three central questions: (1) What are the root causes of urban spatial and environmental injustices? (2) How do dominant/oppressor groups reproduce and defend privileges based on caste, race, gender, and class? (3) How and why do urban marginalized groups contest spatial, ecological, and labor injustices and to what ends?
My book, Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City, coauthored with David Pike (American University) and Sapana Doshi (UC Merced), was published with Cornell University Press’s Series on Land: New Perspectives on Territory, Development, and Environment (2023) and Yoda Press, India (2024). We study land and real estate politics and narratives in rapidly urbanizing cities of the global South. It draws on literature and film to look at how people tell stories about corruption in cities around the world. It is the winner of 2024 the Anthony Leeds Book Prize awarded by the Critical Urban Anthropology Association. The book is an outcome of a grant from the Andrew Mellon-American Council of Learned Societies.
In the U.S., I have been conducting research in Washington, DC’s Ward 7 on climate injustice, housing segregation, and deep histories of environmental racism. My recent work has called for an abolitionist approach to climate justice. This work was featured on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU 88.5 on NPR in September 2019, and various other media outlets. For a summary of how I approach environmental justice theoretically and transnationally, please see my essay “The Environment as Freedom: A Decolonial Reimagining.”
Prior to coming to American University, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy initiative at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, based out of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science. I received a Master’s and PhD from the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) at the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. I received a Bachelor’s degree from Bard College in NY.
Please browse my research and publications to learn more.
***Credit for the banner art on my home page goes to the incredible feminist artist, Vidushi Yadav.***