Welcome to my website and thanks for visiting! I am Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC, where I teach graduate and undergraduate courses on sustainability, global health, development, urban politics, and environmental justice through the lenses of critical geography, development studies, anticaste theory, and decolonial and critical race theory. I am also a faculty affiliate of the following units/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. 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? I study environmental justice politics in both India (largely Bengaluru in the state of Karnataka) and the U.S. (largely Washington, DC). To learn more about my research ethics and positionality, please click on the “Research” tab.
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). It is the winner of 2024 the Anthony Leeds Book Prize awarded by the Critical Urban Anthropology Association. The book upends commonsensical notions that equate corruption with illegality, bribery, or the failure of “Third World” states to evolve into a market system. We study corruption from the streets of Bengaluru, Mumbai, and other rapidly urbanizing millennial cities of the global South, where black money skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoke outrage at deepening economic polarization. Our book argues that rather than being a deviation from (neo)liberal capitalism, corruption politics lie at the heart of global capital flows. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories of corruption from cities around the world, we suggest that “corruption talk” is fundamental to a global storytelling practice about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism, even if these actions are not always technically “illegal.” These are stories not of corruption of the system, but corruption as the system. Corruption Plots also demonstrates how, in this moment of late capitalism and rightwing populism, corruption talk is leveraged to make ethical and affective sense of economic inequality. We warn, however, that it can be used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing, especially to “other” marginalized groups. We thus pay close attention to the race, caste, class, and gender location of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. The book works across the humanities and social sciences to build theory “from” the global South–theory that is indispensable for understanding real estate capitalism and inequality everywhere, especially in the global North, where corruption talk is assiduously avoided in political discourse. The book is an outcome of a grant from the Andrew Mellon-American Council of Learned Societies.
I am currently working on three book projects. The first is a collaborative book with Isaac Arul Selva and Siddharth K.J, both scholar-activists and anti-caste writers based in Bengaluru: The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor, and Environmental Politics in Bengaluru. Based on collaborative research, the book traces histories of caste-class power in the city and how it is implicated in exclusionary and extractive land, ecology, and labor regimes. In it, we consider the potential for legal, union, slum, and anticaste activism and narratives to disrupt injustices perpetuated by caste-class power.
Second, I am working on a theoretically and historically-oriented monograph titled The Climate of Labor Justice: Planetary Ecologies of Racial Capitalism, Caste, and Freedom. This book argues that we must understand the global climate crisis not simply as a crisis of capitalism, but specifically as a crisis of labor. Just as fossil capitalism sought out new commodity and land frontiers, it also sought out new labor frontiers, made possible by heirarchies of caste and race that rendered certain groups disposable. The book places labor politics at the heart of an agenda for progressive climate politics and “remaps” the climate crisis by looking at transnational labor regimes connecting India, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean World. To frame a global history of labor from the colonial to contemporary period, the book introduces the reader to caste-and race-based labor and land regimes, climate- and debt-induced migration, and ecological and economic precarity in southern India and Indian Ocean World from the 19th century. The book draws on over 15 years of ethnographic and archival research on political ecologies of caste, racial capitalism, and colonialism and connects this with histories of indentured labor (“coolie”) migration to the plantation colonies of British Malaya from the late 19th century.
Third, and finally, based on long-term research at the flood-prone peripheries of Bengaluru, I am working on a manuscript titled Wetland Grabs: Ecology, Property, and Climate Justice in Bengaluru. The book traces colonial planning ideologies, nationalist city-making, and the quiet workings of caste supremacy in property law from the mid-20th century that encouraged the usurpation of wetlands (keres) and storm canals (raja kaluves), all of which opened the floodgates to (wet)land grabs and unequal flood risk in the new millennium. It also draws on interviews with youth activists to reveal how young people in India are reframing climate justice in a moment of resurgent nationalism on the one hand and radical climate internationalism on the other.
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.***