Research Ethics and Positionality
I rely on ethnographic interviews, oral histories, participant observation, and archival research to investigate three thematic clusters outlined below. I work collaboratively with scholars, researchers, lawyers, and activists, and take seriously the call to decolonize research methodology to ensure that it is less extractive and one-way. I was born in New Delhi, India, and spent formative years in New Delhi, Bangalore, Addis Ababa, Moscow, and Beijing due to my father’s diplomatic career in the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. Thanks to a full-tuition scholarship, I moved to the U.S. for undergraduate studies, and, after a brief period during which I returned to India to work for a development and environment non-profit, I came back to the U.S. for a PhD. I have since made my career in the U.S. academy, with enduring research and family connections in Bangalore. This layered and cross-continental vantage means that I am aware of micro and macro power relations in all their complexity and contradiction. I try to develop research questions collaboratively with grassroots organizers and advocates. I follow their lead in framing research partnerships that decenter proprietary ownership over intellectual work. Doing so is a small effort to challenge the “myth of merit” in liberal, overwhelmingly white, and extractivist academic spaces. I contribute financially to activists and their outreach initiatives to the best of my ability, and I try to ensure a transparent and authentic citational politics and multiauthorial approach, whenever relevant. This is a research ethic that is no doubt a work in progress and is prone to missteps. I welcome critique and feedback at any time.
(1) Political Ecologies of Caste and Race
Caste has generally been ignored in critical urban studies and urban political ecology. Yet caste is everywhere hidden in plain sight in the city, from the intimate spaces of the oppressor caste household; to the segregated food and housing geographies dividing vegetarians from meat-eaters on the basis of purity/pollution binaries; to the mass evictions that stigmatize and banish Dalit slum dwellers to the far outskirts.
I was honored to speak on a panel organized by Suraj Yengde and Prashant Ingole titled “Anticaste Ecological Politics” in May 2020. Check it out!
This work builds on my earlier research on water politics, stormwater infrastructure, and landed property regimes in Bangalore’s colonial and post-independence period (undertaken between 2005-2020). For instance, tracing classically liberal regimes of private property ownership to the British East India Company in the late 1700s, I found that British colonial planners—motivated both by the fear of the diseased “native” (including lower-caste Hindus and “Mohammadens”) and the desire for property taxation revenue—had carved up segregated housing for Bangalore’s economic, caste, and cultural elite, a process still known today as urban “improvement.” It has also assembled the conditions for flood and climate change risk.
Second in this cluster, I am working on a book on climate, caste, and racial capitalism in regional and global perspective. The book s titled The Climate of Labor Justice: Planetary Ecologies of Racial Capitalism, Caste, and Freedom. Recent media narratives paint an alarming picture of migrants fleeing from extreme weather events across borders. This is an exaggerated and analytically misleading narrative that not only over-focuses on present-day climate events, extricating climate-related vulnerability from other social and economic relations–such as those wrought by caste and debt-bondage–but is also used in the service of xenophobic and racist sentiments harbored by right-wing politicians. Against this narrative, my book considers the predicament of labor in the “long” climate crisis – namely the longer-term threats that climate extremes (droughts, floods, etc), interacting with labor extraction, landlessness, debt relations, and social inequity, have always posed–from the colonial to contemporary period. Only by examining colonial droughts and famines, for instance, do we really understand how power and inequality shape climate-related migratory and labor justice outcomes in the present day. I further suggest that migratory connections between south India and the Indian Ocean World are a useful starting point for understanding why, in fact, the long climate crisis is inseparable from a long labor crisis.
(2) Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City
A second research area, culminating with the publication of my book in 2023, examines “corruption” as a political narrative through which urban dwellers challenge land grabs. Across cities of the North and South, the elite flout or manipulate planning regulations and property law with impunity and encroach on wetlands and forests, while poorer groups are evicted and punished for their actions. In this collaborative work, we argue that “corruption” serves as an ethical discourse for deciphering rapid and unequal urban change. We show how marginalized residents and activists deploy a repertoire of strategies, from theatrical performance to right-to-information petitions, to expose what they understand as corruption. Departing from economistic models deployed by international development actors, we show how valuable interpretivist and ethnographic methods are for parsing diverse and shifting meanings attached to corruption.
(3) Antiracism, Abolition, and Environmental Justice in the American City
Finally, I am interested in racial and environmental justice in the US. In fact, it is by deepening my work on racial violence and the imperatives of abolition in the US that I have been able to scrutinize urban scholarship on India through an anti-caste lens. This has worked both ways, of course. For instance, some of my thinking across the North-South divide stems from a 2015 scholarly article I co-wrote calling for “transnational learning” between California’s Central Valley and Bangalore’s urban fringes. Following the call in the critical social sciences for thinking “from” the South (and not just “about” the South), we find that informality is very much present in Central California’s poorer, Latinx-Hispanic urban fringes, but is rarely grasped as such. On this basis, we contend that rethinking how minority farm laborers in poorer urban fringes engage the state for basic services through insights from political practices in the South decolonizes academic inquiry and reveals novel possibilities for policy change.
Along with Professor Ros Donald and Professor Aarushi Sahejpal, I am working on a project titled Climate Story Gaps in Washington, D.C. funded by American University’s Center For Environment, Community, and Equity. In a previous research grant funded by AU’s Metropolitan Policy Center, Eve Bratman (Assistant Professor, Franklin and Marshall College) and I studied: (a) what makes certain groups in DC vulnerable to environmental change and climate disasters and (b) how organizing around housing and displacement by minorities can be leveraged for building “resilience” to climate change in the fullest sense of the word. Our findings published in Antipode establish that the environmental injustices (proximity to toxic wastes, illegal dumping, public transport idling) suffered by African Americans in the District—owing to a legacy of institutionalized discrimination and racial segregation—are deeply consequential for climate vulnerability. For instance, there is a long history of environmental injustice in the Kenilworth/Parkside/Eastland Gardens area of Ward 7. Residents report toxic wastes in the soil near the community rec center due to an old (now shut down) waste incinerator, placed there in the post-war period when it was already clear that the area was predominantly African American. The area also has a history of flooding, including sewage overflow in the now-closed elementary school (Thomas Elementary). A third problem is illegal dumping as seen by the plea in this photo.
Our research on the place-based and historically rooted vulnerabilities in Ward 7 in DC’s northeast Anacostia region will provide needed texture to macro assessments of DC’s climate risk. To learn more, please visit the project website and an interview I conducted in 2019 for NPR. For a recent talk I gave at UCLA, please watch the video below.