Research

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. That being said, I am acutely aware of the privileges of my positionality and unearned advantages. I am an Indian-American immigrant born of dominant inter-caste (non-brahmin and brahmin) South Indian parentage (Malayali and Tamil). I am also a cis-het middle-class scholar in the U.S. academy. I was born in New Delhi, India, and spent formative years in India, Ethiopia, the U.S.S.R, China, and France. 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 an environmental organization, 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 to Bangalore. Living primarily in the U.S. has made me realize that middle-class Indian-Americans like myself are routinely recruited to bolster–and themselves buy into–the “model minority myth” to negatively stereotype racial minorities in the U.S., even while history shows that South Asian immigration to the U.S. has benefited precisely from the civil rights struggles of these same minorities. I actively resist this myth and try to practice a reflexive solidarity with Black, Brown, and Indigenous scholars and activists, while also amplifying and supporting the scholarship, activism, art, and writing of Dalits, Bahujans and Adivasis in the U.S., India, and wider diaspora. 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 Racial Capitalism
I am working on two books in this cluster, which forms the centerpiece of my current scholarship. Caste has generally been ignored in critical urban studies and urban political ecology, especially since these two fields have been heavily influenced by “metropolitan” frameworks rooted in postcolonial, poststructural, and Marxian theory. Yet caste is everywhere hidden in plain sight in the city, from the intimate spaces of the oppressor caste household, where domestic help must drink water from a cup reserved exclusively for her to avoid “contaminating” utensils; 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; to the precarious sanitation and manual labor heaped almost exclusively on workers belonging to the Adi Karnataka, Adi Dravida, Adi Andhra and other Dalit castes

First, my collaborative book project with Issac Arul Selva (founder of Slum Jagatthu) and Siddharth K.J. (an independent scholar-activist) is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. It seeks to center caste power as a key analytic in the study of urban space, labor, and ecologies. Caste is a relational system of power, which means that it must be “studied up” as much as it is “studied down.” We write explicitly to frame an anticaste urban praxis. In particular, we look at the role of caste power in labor exploitation, housing segregation, land grabs, and ecologically unjust development. We consider the role of brahmanism and neoliberal corporate influence in urban “greening” and lake restoration efforts, showing how these betray casteist and communal (anti-Muslim) impulses to rid the city of unwanted SC/ST and migrant populations. These impulses, though appearing to be caste-neutral and “ecological”, sit all too comfortably with right-wing Hindutva programs to criminalize beef-eating and “illegal Bangladeshis.” Please see below for a presentation I gave at the King’s India series “Confronting Caste” in November 2020. Comrades and I coedited a book with Routledge (2022) titled “Rethinking Difference in India through Racialization: Caste, Tribe, and Hindu Nationalism in Transnational Perspective.”

Ultimately, in confronting these logics of caste power, my book project argues for an approach to environmental and social justice centered on anticaste humanism. 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. For instance, tracing classically liberal regimes of private property ownership to the British East India Company in the late 1700s, I found that 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.” Crucially, this process has left Dalits [bureaucratically, “Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST), including ex-untouchable castes], poor Muslims, and other laboring classes to negotiate informal housing and services with the lower bureaucracy. It has also assembled the conditions for flood and climate change risk, what I have referred to as climate apartheid and eco-casteism in forthcoming work.

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Second, I am working on an a books 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. Finally my book draws on Asian diasporic labor history to show that idioms of freedom, dignity, and self-respect can shape a left, internationalist pro-labor climate movement.

(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. First, Sapana Doshi (Associate Professor at UC Merced) and I 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.

Building on the humanistic strengths of this work, we teamed up with literary scholar David Pike (Professor, American University) to successfully apply for a grant from the ACLS (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) to write a book-length monograph on corruption narratives in imagined and real urban worlds. Weaving our ethnography together with the fictional worlds of novels and films, we have just completed a book manuscript titled Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics and Publics in the Millennial City. This book is forthcoming with Cornell University Press’s “Land: New Perspectives on Territory” book series edited by scholars Michael Goldman, Wendy Wolford, and Nancy Peluso. In it, we analyze ethnographic and literary story-telling to argue that “corruption” is deployed by differentially situated groups to call attention to a widening wealth gap and the erosion of the public sphere. What is especially fascinating to us is how corruption is used to name real estate collusions between the state and private actors that are officially deemed “legal.” In other words, corruption talk is more about the affect and ethics surrounding urban transformation than a strict binary between what is considered “illegal” and “legal.”

This forthcoming book is a complement to my previous research critiquing the donor-driven anti-corruption agenda and, specifically, the alleged role of digital technology in improving the responsiveness and accountability of bureaucracy. In these prior publications, I show that technologies designed to digitize citizen complaints (“e-grievance redressal”), a popular “good governance” tool, systematically bias against collective in-person complaints lodged by lower class and lower-caste women living in informal settlements at the outskirts of Bengaluru.

(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.

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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.